Néstor Kohan (Argentina)
Capital’s Responses to the Crises of Capitalism
Contrary to various trends circulating in the social sciences, we begin with a question that places us within a wide-angle perspective—no ‘micro’ cuts or minimalist decorations that seek to evade or ignore the history and context of the debates. We question the era in which we (sur)live, openly discussing the much-talked-about, promoted, and completely false “crisis of grand narratives.”[1]
As a premise of this work, we maintain that the contemporary emergence of the “new right” is not rooted in the human soul, is not “inherent to our species,” and does not respond to an unfathomable evil or the cruel nature of humanity. We are suspicious of supposed “original sins” and any other kind of metaphysical essence. The rise of neo-fascism is intrinsic to the historical crisis of the global capitalist system.
It is true that planetary “disorder” is not entirely spontaneous. It is fostered, cultivated, and encouraged by large capitalist corporations and their counterinsurgency strategists, known as “the engineers of chaos.” But this engineering of social control (big data, lawfare, fake news, hybrid wars, etc.) is not applied out of mere boredom. It is not just another harmless or innocent way to occupy one’s free time. It is implemented out of a sense of social urgency—the need to confront the crisis of global capitalism.
Our era is marked by a coexistence of diverse antagonistic contradictions within the capitalist social order, converging on the horizon of a long-term structural crisis. This crisis is far more acute and explosive than those of 1929, 1973–1974, and 2007–2008.
We are witnessing not only the crisis of the global capitalist economy in the productive, commercial, and financial spheres; we are also suffering crises of the environment and ecosystem, demographics, food, health, and of the historical forms of postmodern subjectivity and the commodified culture that gave rise to them. Added to this is a geopolitical crisis of the unipolar world, among many other facets of the complex reality in which we live.
To defend themselves and cope with such a structural and multidimensional crisis, the forces of imperialism and capital are desperately and aggressively thrashing about. In pursuit of this goal, they do not hesitate to bring humanity to the brink of the precipice—even dragging us into the risk of an increasingly imminent third world war.
In the face of each structural crisis, the capitalist system has attempted to deploy various responses, always aimed at ensuring its survival: the reproduction of the system. These responses take economic, political, cultural, and even politico-military forms.
The notorious emergence of furious and extreme “new right-wing” movements is part of a larger whole: the counter-revolutionary attempt to manage the crisis, slow down the decline of Western Euro–North American imperialism, and reduce as much as possible the global tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
In other words, the emergence and development of the “new right” is part of a global counter-revolutionary attempt that is not driven by the “evil” or “madness” of a few powerful individuals. On the contrary, the “new right” constitutes an attempt to shape a capitalist response to the crisis. This response takes different forms, always within the spectrum of the “new right”: fascism and neo-fascism, counterinsurgency, and neo-colonialism.
Discussing the Categories
Before addressing the capitalist counter-revolution in the 20th century and in the current century, let us briefly pause to consider the sphere of categories.
Among many other sacred cows and prestigious names in the social sciences, we highlight, for example, that of Chantal Mouffe. This writer states, with complete levity, that: “I maintain that categories such as ‘fascism’ and ‘far right’ or comparisons with the 1930s are not appropriate […]”[2]. To replace them, this essayist of great academic renown invites us to use the slippery term “populism,” which she explored together with Ernesto Laclau.
Can Javier Milei’s far-right experiment in Argentina—recently adopted as an example to follow by various extremists worldwide—or Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime in the Middle East be characterised as “populist”? The negative answer to this question is obvious.
Unfortunately, conceptual ambiguity is not the exclusive property of Chantal Mouffe. Another famous essayist who is currently in vogue, Enzo Traverso, stumbles as he attempts to climb the theoretical slope to grasp the specificity of contemporary right-wing extremism. If “populism” is too loose, indeterminate, and polysemic a category, Traverso can think of no better idea than to replace it with “post-fascism,” which not only explains nothing (except that the political and cultural phenomena of recent times are taking place decades after the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Salazar), but also represents an unnecessary capitulation to “post-” fashions (post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-workerism, postcolonial studies, etc.), to which we can now add… post-fascism.
In Traverso’s case, moreover, the vagueness and theoretical eclecticism are exacerbated when he attempts to oppose, in the face of supposed “post-fascism,” nothing less than “democracy” (sic)—thus, in general, without qualification, without social determinations.[3]
Further adding to the ideological confusion and fuelling the theoretical eclecticism that seems to reign in the field that perceives itself as “emancipatory” or “progressive,” Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg expound at length, appealing to this mixed bag of categories, with the sole distinction that these two essayists at least attempt to differentiate between “radical populism, of a neoliberal, even libertarian nature,” and “authoritarian national populism.”[4]
Do we then accept the limitations of this type of purely nominal definition, without any anchoring in socio-economic and historical determinations or any theoretical problematisation?
To avoid falling into such conceptual misunderstandings, ambiguities, and inaccuracies—so often cultivated by postmodern essay writing (and its “post” derivatives)—it is advisable first to agree on the precise content and specific meaning of the central categories used here: “counter-revolution,” “fascism,” and “counterinsurgency.”
The social phenomenon of counter-revolution constitutes that type of reaction by capital against the labour force and oppressed peoples that occurs when the global capitalist system is undergoing an acute crisis and the subaltern classes become undisciplined and refuse to passively accept their subordination to the “normal” order of capitalist hegemony. This reaction consists of the response of capital to a fundamental threat, where its historical mode of production, reproduction, and domination is endangered.
Its manifestations are diverse and broad, united by a common denominator: the counter-revolutionary offensive of capitalism and imperialism as a whole, guided by a strategic defence of the system.
This is not a “passive revolution,” as Antonio Gramsci calls the partial reforms carried out “from above,” which molecularly modify the balance of power between classes by making concessions under the control of capital with the aim of preserving the socio-political order. Unlike such processes, which often coexist with counter-revolution, the latter takes on a much more radical, generalised, violent, and strategic character—characterised by a global impulse confronting the workforce and all rebellious peoples who do not meekly obey the despotic dictates of capital in various fields (economic, social, cultural, political, and even military).
Every deep crisis of the system of capital’s domination produces a capitalist response—not the periodic crises of overproduction or stagnation, but long-term, global structural crises in which previous social stabilities explode due to their multiple contradictions. The aim is to reorder society, generating social ruptures—separating and fracturing in order to reunite—thus reactivating the processes of extreme violence that characterised the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital, while recomposing and reinforcing capitalist domination.
Fascism and Its Multiple Forms
According to the widely known definition formulated by the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov in the reports to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, fascism consists of “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most nationalist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[5]
Other Marxists, such as the Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, have emphasised that although fascism undoubtedly benefits big capital due to its class character, its main mass force and base of manoeuvre—for example, in the personnel of the shock troops and the members of its gigantic repressive police—is drawn from the petty bourgeoisie, since fascism benefits big capital not directly through the economy but through political mediation. In this form, state repression of the working class (its trade unions and political parties, replaced by a corporate order completely subordinate to the capitalist state) and its potential allies becomes partially independent from its main beneficiaries, taking on “Bonapartist” forms (a category that Karl Marx devised to explain the counter-revolutionary coup d’état of December 1851 in France, a country then shaken by a workers’ and popular rebellion stemming from the insurrection of 1848).
For his part, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci added that fascism, essentially counter-revolutionary, also takes on “Caesarist” political forms, with an apparently unstable balance between the disputing classes (even persecuting Freemasonry in order to replace its personnel in the state administration with its own). Ultimately, however, it directly benefits big capital, since, in his view, bourgeois democracy and fascism divide the tasks in their struggle against the working classes.[6]
Reducing the characterisation of “fascism” exclusively to a single national reality and a single historical experience (for example, Italy between 1922 and 1945) implies an illegitimate restriction of the category. The same would happen if the notion of “Bonapartism” were used exclusively to refer to France between December 1851 and 1870.
The categories of Marxist critical theory are not limited to a purely descriptive, linear snapshot of a single economic-social formation at a given moment. They have a broader explanatory scope—much to the displeasure of Lyotard and his followers. Even Dimitrov himself, one of the first to systematise this notion in his attempt to rethink the counter-revolutionary forms of imperialist capital, clarifies that “the development of fascism and its dictatorship takes different forms [Dimitrov’s emphasis, N.K.] in different countries, depending on historical, social, and economic conditions; according to national particularities and the international position of the given country.”[7]
This variety of conceptual characterisations of fascism becomes even more complex if the category is used to explain Latin American civil-military dictatorships—equally genocidal and promoters of capitalist counter-revolution—not in the metropolitan centres of the imperialist countries, but in the dependent capitalist peripheries.
For example, in a debate held in Mexico four decades after Georgi Dimitrov’s thesis was formulated—more precisely on 20 July 1978—at a permanent seminar on Latin America (SEPLA) entitled “The External Sources of Fascism: Latin American Fascism and the Interests of Imperialism,” Ecuadorian Marxist researcher Agustín Cueva, while maintaining strong sympathy for Dimitrov’s definition, argued that the Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s (Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Somoza, etc.) had directly fascist forms.
Brazilian Marxist theorist Theotonio Dos Santos responded to this conceptualisation by arguing that, if the capitalist response with fascist connotations predominated in Latin America in the face of various emancipatory and revolutionary processes, this fascism took on specific forms, different from those of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (which Dimitrov had in mind), noting that in Our America, a “dependent fascism”[8] predominated.
In his response to Agustín Cueva, Theotonio Dos Santos—without having read or known him—nonetheless converged with the reflection that, four decades earlier (in 1938), had been formulated by the Argentine Marxist thinker Ernesto Giudici.
Giudici, linking Latin American anti-fascism (which identified Nazi Germany as the main enemy) with anti-imperialism (which focused its strategy on the struggle against British and American domination over Our America), sought to problematise and deepen Dimitrov’s reflection in various directions.
On the one hand, Giudici argued that fascism is not only “the terrorist dictatorship of big monopoly capital” but also “the totalitarian, terrorist, and permanent dictatorship of the bourgeoisie dependent on finance capital, whatever the degree of its capitalist development” [emphasis added by N.K.][9].
In this way, Marxist critical theory could explain a phenomenon of universal scope—not only European—but also including the counter-revolutionary forms that periodically reappear in different societies of the Third World or Global South. Furthermore, Giudici, while still a member of the Communist International, reproached Dimitrov for limiting his theoretical definition by overemphasising the economic dimension (centred on monopoly capitalism), adding that fascism expresses itself not only economically but also politically, assuming specific cultural forms and combining these three dimensions differently according to each socio-economic formation and specific situation of class struggle.[10]
Giudici’s Marxist reflection remains extremely useful for rethinking and analysing the dissimilar and specific characteristics assumed in each society by the global emergence of the “new” counterinsurgent far right in our own day—both in Europe and the United States, and in Latin America.
In turn, Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta Mercado added that in Our America, fascist and crypto-fascist regimes are not born or developed as the result of a national project, but under U.S. hegemony and direction,[11] a thesis with which Theotonio Dos Santos[12] would agree.
Returning to the debate in Mexico in 1978, Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini (an internationalist activist, like Theotonio Dos Santos, in Chile during the Salvador Allende era) added a supplementary characterisation to the theories of Cueva and Dos Santos, proposing that the capitalist counter-revolution of the 1970s in Latin America be understood as a global process aimed at establishing, on a continental scale and under U.S. imperialist domination, “counterinsurgency states.”[13]
At this point, having sought to explain the precise content and fundamental attributes of two political categories—counter-revolution and fascism—we encounter difficulties in specifying the content of a third: counterinsurgency.
Counterinsurgency in the Era of Imperialism
Irregular forms of combat between asymmetrical forces (where insurgents fight against an invading army or vastly superior forces in numbers, equipment, and resources that wage a counterinsurgency war) are very old and certainly predate the 20th and 21st centuries.
Suffice it to recall, for example, the irregular resistance of the Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon’s armies in the first decade of the 19th century in Europe. The same is true of the black slave guerrillas in Haiti against the invading French troops (from the last decade of the 18th century until their victory in 1804); the indigenous insurgency in Upper Peru (now the Plurinational State of Bolivia) led by the guerrillas of Juana Azurduy and Manuel Ascencio Padilla against Spanish colonialism in the early decades of the 19th century; and the irregular forces of the Venezuelan llaneros led by Páez, Arismendi, and Piar under the leadership of Simón Bolívar, as well as the guerrilla forces of Warnes, Arenales, Martín Miguel de Güemes, and Juana Azurduy, fighters of the anti-colonial forces led by San Martín, during the American wars of independence in the second decade of the 19th century.
Faced with all these insurgent forces, the political-military enemy—whether from another invading capitalist power (as in the case of Napoleon in Spain) or from European colonialism (as in the case of the South American guerrillas)—developed forms of counterinsurgency warfare.
However, modern counterinsurgency has specific attributes, qualities, and modalities that only reached full development from the end of the 19th century onwards, with the rise of capitalism in its fully developed phase of imperialism.
A contemporary definition of insurgency—by no means scholastic or speculative, but fully operational—can be found in Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency (written under the direction of Generals David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos, 2006, Washington: Department of the Army):
“Insurgency is an organised, protracted, political-military struggle designed to undermine the control and legitimacy of an established government, an occupying force, or another political authority, while increasing insurgent control.”
It adds that it is “typically a form of internal warfare, one that occurs primarily within a state, not between states, and one that contains at least certain elements of civil war. Counterinsurgency refers to military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions carried out by a government to defeat the insurgency.”[14]
As a political-military means of fighting rebel forces, counterinsurgency became widespread on a global scale after the Second World War.[15]
In this historical phase of capitalism, where imperialism predominates, the category of counterinsurgency helps explain and account for:
(a) the general capitalist response to the crisis of the system of accumulation and reproduction;
(b) the political form assumed by the state when it becomes partially independent from the dominant classes it claims to defend, in the face of the insurgent threat of labour and the popular camp;
(c) the specifically political-military and counterinsurgent character assumed by class struggle when the capitalist counter-revolution sets out not only to resolve the crisis of the system and repress the popular camp, but also to crush the insurgent revolutionary movement—usually through annihilation and genocide, far beyond mere police repression.
Counterinsurgency becomes genocidal and adopts the decision to annihilate when it faces an enemy social force that is organised, morally and materially prepared for confrontation, equipped with a defined strategy aimed at revolution and the seizure of power, and capable of flexibly managing different fronts and forms of struggle (legal, semi-legal, clandestine; economic, cultural, political, and military—all at once, within a global insurgency project).
Conversely, counterinsurgency remains preventive when its historical enemy exercises rebellion and indiscipline in a series of spontaneous protests, whether of an economic-corporate nature (for stable employment, wages, health, education, housing, etc.) or in defence of special rights as distinct social groups (sexual freedoms, legal rights, freedom of the press and information, etc.). In this latter case, the enemy has not yet structured itself into a long-term belligerent force, due to political or ideological weakness, social fragmentation, or the absence of a coherent strategy for the seizure of power.
In this sense, Ruy Mauro Marini’s conceptualisation can be refined by differentiating between counterinsurgency states where the military objective focuses primarily on annihilation, and those where counterinsurgency remains at a preventive, “low-intensity” level—exercised even under republican forms, with periodic elections and a functioning parliament, but framed within a clearly counterinsurgent strategy.
Why would there be counterinsurgency if there is no active political-military insurgency? Because the forces of capital do not wait until the last minute—until “civil war breaks out”—to begin identifying, registering, classifying, monitoring, and subjugating their enemies. Annihilation is prepared years in advance, during which prevention still predominates.
If we accept this complexity of categorisation and refine our conceptual definitions, then we can not only differentiate between two types of counterinsurgency (active-operational and preventive), but also understand that fascist and neo-fascist forms do not always depend on mass mobilisation as a defining characteristic. There may be forms of fascism that relied from the outset on mass mobilisation (as in Italy and Germany until their defeat in the Second World War at the hands of the Red Army and the communist partisans), but there may also be others where counter-revolutionary terror—using methods copied from Nazism, such as torture, extermination camps, and anti-Semitism—was exercised by police and military forces without mass mobilisation, or even against it.
Furthermore, fascist and neo-fascist movements and regimes are not exclusively “political” in nature. They are economic, political, cultural, and politico-military phenomena. The archetypal case of German fascism, known as Nazism, is highly illustrative. In books, articles, films, and documentaries, it is often reduced to a purely political and military phenomenon. Little attention is usually paid to its economic and social structure, which remained largely intact after its crushing defeat in 1945 at the hands of the Red Army. In Nuremberg, priority was given to the trial of genocidal perpetrators in brown uniforms, while the capitalist companies that made fortunes from Nazism and enabled its rise remained largely unpunished (Muchnik, 1999). Most of them continued to operate, recycled after 1945 under new names—many still active to this day.
The Dead End and Capitulations of the “Anti-Totalitarian” School
Why is it so difficult, complex, and elusive to conceptualise, theorise, and reflect on the new extreme right and neo-fascism of the 21st century? Because there is a vast jungle of ideological justifications that present themselves as “anti-totalitarian” and, therefore, anti-fascist, when in reality they are covert apologists for the extreme right.
To the shameful list of mandarins of imperialist power—clearly denialist—who write freely in an attempt to sweep under the carpet, cover up, diminish, and even justify the genocidal practices of Nazi imperialism, we must add a neighbouring and adjacent school, scandalously close to the shameless apologists of the German Führer and his uniformed butchers of Italian fascism and Spanish Francoism.
This is the “anti-totalitarian” current, so obsessed with combating any possible resurgence of social revolution or red communism that its members—refined swindlers who have abandoned any semblance of historiographical seriousness—end up equating, through circus juggling and fairground sleight of hand, the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution and the mere existence of the Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany and its “Final Solution” (a euphemism used to justify one of the greatest genocides in human history, comparable only—as Aimé Césaire warned in 1955 in his Discourse on Colonialism—to what European colonialism had previously done to the African and Indigenous peoples of Our America).
In this neighbouring school, equally infected by the anti-communist rage of pro-Nazi deniers, the fauna is varied and diverse. It includes a few academics who pose as defenders of “ultra-neoliberal” Western conservatism (from whose coordinates they strive to minimise the Nazi massacres, shielding them under the frayed umbrella of the “European civil war” and the most fanatical anti-communism), to media buffoons—less attached to academic norms and more attentive to the staging of McCarthyist show business.
Among the former is François Furet, a French historian (once prestigious), a former Marxist turned pitiful crusader against communism, a movement he had belonged to between 1949 and 1956. Disappointed with communism, as was the epistemologist Karl Popper—initially a communist activist in Austria and later a guru of fundamentalist neoliberalism—Furet ended up fighting against the red flag without shame, sowing the seeds of what he now claims as the leitmotif of the international coordination of the most extreme new European right.[16]
His pathetic German co-pilot is the historian Ernst Nolte (ultra-Catholic by training, a direct disciple and friend of Martin Heidegger, as could hardly be otherwise), who competes with his French colleague to see who wins the European cup of the most deranged anti-communism.[17]
Furet commented on Nolte’s libel, to which Nolte responded with a letter. The correspondence between the two, originally published in the magazine Commentaire, comprised eight letters in total between 1997 and 1998 and was later published as a single book under a title that unequivocally leads us to an identification that is, in itself, absurd and delusional: Fascism and Communism.[18]
Both historians ended their intellectual careers as radical right-wing extremists. But Nolte, in particular—though he assumes the exaggerated appearance of a supposed “liberal” character for obvious opportunistic academic reasons—comes remarkably close to the revisionists and neo-Nazi deniers, casting doubt on the number of people annihilated in the Nazi extermination camps or giving the benefit of the doubt to the columns of smoke from the crematoria at Auschwitz, which revisionists characterised as… “an optical illusion” [sic].[19]
The mockery of all serious historiographical research is devoid of intellectual honesty, even from the most recalcitrant right-wing standpoint. Following his own logic: could the mushroom clouds from the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been smoke from a barbecue organised by disoriented Japanese tourists at a summer campsite? Only an intellectual lumpen like Ernst Nolte could afford to mock and degrade fundamental and emblematic elements of the Nazi genocide with impunity—because he is German. If a Paraguayan, Guatemalan, Mexican, or Argentine historian did the same, they would be thrown in jail or invited to appear on a tasteless, low-brow comedy show.
Nolte added to this extremist and counter-revolutionary constellation one of the propaganda ideas that has since become a mantra: Islamophobia—even going so far as to equate the political tradition of Islam with fascism. This nonsense, without evidence, logic, or coherence, has unfortunately been adopted by the international coordination of the extreme right, even in countries once governed by tolerant, pro-capitalist social democracies.[20]
Neither Nolte nor Furet are alone in their respective countries in this counterinsurgency crusade of the Knights Templar—half grotesque, half pathetic—that obsessively seeks to eradicate and bury once and for all any trace of anti-capitalist insurgency, Marxism, and communism, while diluting, diminishing, justifying, and, when possible, outright denying the Nazi genocide.
Nolte is accompanied, as he proudly notes whenever possible, by a pitiful team that panics every time it imagines seeing, from afar, through binoculars and a window, a tiny red flag: the insufferable Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Michael Stürmer. All of them have happily thrown overboard the justified “guilt” once expressed by the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers on behalf of the German people for having enthusiastically supported Hitler.
And Furet, poor man, was luckier—he had a chorus of companions even more frivolous, banal, and superficial than Nolte’s boring, fascist, and unbearable German associates. These are the bombastic and histrionic “New Philosophers,” who are neither new nor philosophers. Among them are Maurice Clavel, Jean-Marie Benoist, André Glucksmann, Jean-Paul Dollé, and Gilles Susong, among other sellers of black-and-white televisions and promoters of raffles for trips to Disney in shopping malls.
But the most media-savvy of them all is undoubtedly Bernard-Henri Lévy—a fanatical Zionist, promoter of France’s neo-colonial adventures in North Africa (for example, NATO’s imperialist intervention in Libya and the assassination of its president), and a tireless gladiator legitimising the “right to intervene” of U.S. imperialism anywhere on the planet.
Many of them came from the Parisian university elite and briefly showed their faces at the student assemblies of 1968 purely by chance—the year the famous protests erupted. But they became “disenchanted” with Marxism faster than it took them to change their underwear. In one of his few honest writings, Bernard-Henri Lévy confessed that he had betrayed himself many times… before he turned thirty! A complete renegade at such a young age, before even becoming an intellectual—a confession that speaks for itself.
None of these pampered children of the most reactionary elements of the French right—racist, colonialist, pro-Zionist, and xenophobic—ever endured decades of militancy before switching sides in old age out of “maturity” or exhaustion. Had that been the case, their retreat from Marxism might be debatable but, at least, understandable.
This is absolutely not the case with the self-styled “New Philosophers”! Bernard-Henri Lévy engaged in a brief season of ideological tourism in the Maoism of the Gauche Prolétarienne [Proletarian Left], then lived for decades off his unrestrained anti-Marxism and blatant Zionism—for which he was handsomely paid. A lucrative, risk-free business. A lifetime of holidays guaranteed—through Zionism—in Israel, the colonialist and genocidal spearhead of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Had he been born in Latin America, he would surely have enjoyed holidays in Miami or in Colombia, the counterinsurgency narco-state historically known as “the Israel of Latin America.”
His rapid transition—what Samir Amin ironically called “the religious spirit of extreme intellectuals who swing from one extreme to the other without a problem” (Amin, 2008: 221)—resembled a change of shoes or hairstyle more than the development of a coherent theoretical corpus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that his Spanish counterpart, less “chic” and more grey, the best-selling publicist and current admirer of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Pío Moa, also passed through that curious and exotic phase of “European-style Maoism” during his acne-ridden youth.
Bernard-Henri Lévy’s tireless defence of the colonialist, racist, exclusivist, Islamophobic, and pro-American policy of the State of Israel—whether in the French press or in the Spanish Prisa group, where he is a regular columnist—reached such a point that in January 2006, during a lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (founded by David Rockefeller), he declared that “Anti-Americanism is the new anti-Semitism,” equating criticism of U.S. imperialism with anti-Semitic ideology. What nonsense! According to this shameless and arbitrary logic, the American Jewish thinker Noam Chomsky—who has published dozens of works criticising U.S. imperialism—would be… an anti-Semite!
If such arguments—and his brazen defence of Western racism, neocolonialism, and imperialism—were shouted by a drunk in a pub, they would provoke laughter or mockery. But their promoter, applauded by the French far right and the official European establishment, is none other than the anti-communist Bernard-Henri Lévy, who lends himself prestige by posing as a disciple of… Jacques Derrida, the father of “deconstruction.” Oh, what a coincidence!
That is why old François Furet had such bad luck in his anti-communist career, even though he tried hard to ally himself with his German squire. With such co-drivers and such an unserious team of mechanics, no one is going to win a rally—no matter how many prestigious diplomas they hold from the conservative academies of the old 19th-century capital, as Walter Benjamin called it.
In terms of intellectual history, both Nolte’s German anti-communist school and his gang of unscrupulous accomplices, as well as Furet’s anti-Marxist clique—Bernard-Henri Lévy and his French cohorts—fed on what is commonly known as the ideological current of “anti-totalitarianism,” which lightly equates communism with Nazism.
Hannah Arendt, exiled in the United States, published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, at the height of McCarthy’s witch hunt—when Charles Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, and Howard Fast were persecuted, and shady trials targeted anyone suspected of “progressivism.” The labour movement, trade unions, and film industry were harshly repressed. More than 30,000 books were censored or banned in the United States, while private conversations, family gatherings, and meetings between friends were monitored… and many people who had never read two pages of Marx ended up in prison “just in case.”
All this was legitimised through rigged trials, false accusations, anonymous denunciations, and secret interrogations—crowned by the infamous blacklists. A veritable witch hunt that inspired Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1952).
Of course, in the field of racism and apartheid against African Americans in the southern United States, McCarthy innovated nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan and its heirs had long been lynching, segregating, and persecuting Black people without anyone being horrified. Everything continued—and continues—as “normal” in the United States. That is not an “anti-American invention,” as Bernard-Henri Lévy would claim. Someone as far from anti-imperialism as former U.S. President Bill Clinton was forced to apologise publicly in 1997 for the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which more than 400 Black men were deliberately left untreated as human guinea pigs.
Yet neither Hannah Arendt nor the “anti-totalitarian” school she inspired in the United States and Western Europe ever dared to focus their analyses on Senator McCarthy’s persecutions and anti-communist, xenophobic, racist abuses aimed at total population control. When Arendt mentions them—in a 620-page tome—it is only in a microscopic footnote of just three lines![21] Quite simply: embarrassing.
It is no coincidence that the historian of ideas and political culture Domenico Losurdo characterised this “anti-totalitarian” crusade as a direct product of the Cold War and anti-communism, dismantling its claim to equate communism and Nazism as “artificial,” “contrived,” and “an adaptation to the Cold War.”[22]
A similar intellectual imposture and ideological capitulation befell other European intellectuals exiled in the United States, who suddenly became “anti-totalitarian,” denouncing “Eastern despotism” and focusing on the crusade against communism. A lesser-known but telling case is that of the former German communist Karl August Wittfogel, once a member of the Frankfurt School—later co-opted in the U.S. for the most fanatical anti-communist crusades.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s reflection on anti-Semitism is central—but there is not a single mention of Henry Ford, one of Hitler’s idols and a key inspiration for Goebbels and Himmler.[23] Not a single line, not even a footnote! And yet Arendt was writing in the U.S., with every library and archive available to her. Was it too difficult to find and analyse Ford’s legacy in American political culture? Hardly.
Antonio Gramsci, who never set foot in the U.S., focused his attention on “Fordism” when reflecting on “Americanism” in his Prison Notebooks—written almost two decades before Arendt’s book (Notebook 22, 1934).
When it comes to judging the racist, supremacist, and anti-Semitic traditions of the United States, Arendt’s supposedly “anti-totalitarian” work is conspicuously silent.
Those blank pages, those deafening silences, make The Origins of Totalitarianism creak. The omissions do not stem from ignorance but from complicity.
Did Wittfogel suddenly forget everything he researched in Frankfurt when he denounced his former comrades as communists during the McCarthy witch hunts? Was Arendt not struck by the fact that Henry Ford—an icon of American industrial culture—was honoured by Hitler himself?
To understand Arendt’s ideological compromises, one might argue she had to “negotiate” with the prevailing U.S. ideology of the early 1950s. But half a century later, it is indefensible to maintain that same hermeneutic line—yet Enzo Traverso, in Totalitarianism: A History of a Debate, still insists on the homology between communism and Nazism, ignoring the genocides committed by Britain, France, and the U.S. throughout the colonial world.[24]
From Arendt through Wittfogel to Traverso, the “anti-totalitarian” school—perhaps even against its own intentions—is accompanied by certain undesirable friendships.
We must not forget that Ludwig von Mises, in his anti-communist hatred and opposition to “totalitarianism,” did not hesitate to defend the supposed merits of Mussolini’s fascism. In one of his “classics” of the Austrian school, Liberalism (1927), reprinted countless times until 2015 without alteration, von Mises declared:
“It cannot be denied that fascism and all similar dictatorial tendencies are animated by the best of intentions, and that their intervention has saved European civilisation for the time being. The merits acquired by fascism will remain forever in history.”[25]
Let us remember that, in the name of “anti-totalitarianism,” the Austrian economist wrote this five years after Mussolini took power and one year after Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned.
Through the paradoxes of cultural history, both the French convert (Furet) and his German anti-communist associates (led by Nolte), inspired by Cold War “anti-totalitarianism,” ended up wallowing in the same mud as the neo-Nazi revisionists—without distancing themselves from the neoclassical economists, the fathers of neoliberalism, even in its most extreme “Austrian” version. All of them were unbridled right-wingers, defenders of big business and the single party of imperialist capital.
In their furious crusade against any real or imagined memory of communism and the red flag, Furet and Nolte are undoubtedly much closer to the neo-Nazi denialist camp than they themselves imagine—for in many of their works they tried to minimise Hitler’s genocide, extravagantly attributing it to supposed “Asian influences.”
Neo-Nazism and Denialism
Over the last few decades, openly and violently pro-imperialist geopolitical strategies and practices have played a fundamental role among the think tanks and the ruling and dominant classes of Western Europe and the United States of America. It is no coincidence that these strategies and practices have abandoned previous pacifist, republican, and liberal gestures and postures to flirt openly with neo-fascist and apologetic positions that attempt to minimize Nazism—or even openly sympathize with this movement.
It is by no means random that, in recent years, traditional Nazi groups, updated neo-Nazis, Falangists, Francoists, fascists, and the entire supremacist chorus surrounding them have achieved social visibility, electoral legality, absolute “tolerance” on the part of the bourgeoisie previously identified with bourgeois republicanism, and brazen media promotion. This is true both in Western Europe and in the European countries and republics of the former Soviet orbit that have fanatically converted to anti-communism (with euphoric entry into NATO), as well as within the United States, the main gendarme of Western imperialism and the cradle of McCarthyism.
This alarming resurgence of supremacism and neo-Nazism—which justifies or even openly defends imperialist, colonialist, racist, xenophobic, and genocidal policies—was historically preceded, in the American case, by the old fundamentalist theories of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, by the supremacist apologetics of the Western and North American white race in Henry Ford’s The International Jew, as well as by the more contemporary trends of denialism and revisionism. The latter attempt to deny, question, or, if unavoidable, justify the fierce and brutal Nazi–fascist–Franco genocide perpetrated first during the Spanish Civil War and then during the Second World War.
Among the strict deniers, cover-ups, and justifiers of German Nazism, the following stand out: Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, Austin App, and Willis Carto in the United States; Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Robert Faurisson, and Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen in France; and David Irving in England—among many other intellectual frauds, all of whom are fanatical anti-Marxists and uncontrolled anti-communists. To all of them can be added the Spaniard Pío Moa, an exotic yet pitiful former leftist turned vulgar writer of commercial literature, who has achieved fame by disseminating popular hagiographies of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. A staunch denier of the massacres in Spain, Moa is a degraded and peripheral, second-rate version of the Nazi deniers.
These literary representatives of the intellectual Lower Paleolithic are accompanied by more media-recognized “stars” of the political Parnassus, such as Matteo Salvini in Italy, the neo-fascist Vox group in Spain, the far-right Frauke Petry in Germany, the extremist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Jörg Haider (now deceased) of Austria—himself the son of a Nazi and a neo-Nazi in his own right—among many other devoted admirers of the swastika, black leather, and brown shirts.
While the former attempt to perfume and soften Nazi filth with their writing—which is impossible to hide and stinks even if we close our eyes and cover our noses—the latter strive to modernize and update the old fascist forms of social reorganization in the realm of state politics and large media monopolies. In both cases—writers and political representatives—the goal is the same: to defend and promote counterinsurgency in a vain attempt to “save” the imperialist system of twilight capitalism in the face of the undeniable crisis of the unipolar world.
The “New” Neo-Fascist Right
In publications promoting German Nazi denialism, Italian neo-fascist revisionism, Spanish neo-Francoism, and the militant anti-communism of various “anti-totalitarian” schools (whether French, German, American, etc.)—all historically preceded by the pro-imperialist doctrines of Monroe and the Manifest Destiny of the United States, as well as by Ford’s anti-Semitic newspapers and volumes—although often delusional and quasi-psychedelic, the crusaders’ arguments attempt to weave together a minimal “theoretical” discourse (in multiple quotation marks). With no small amount of eclecticism and an abundance of pragmatic opportunism, Zionism joins this ghost train, accompanied by the pro-Nazi sympathies allegedly shown by Zelensky in Ukraine (who publicly honors Stepan Bandera, a collaborator of Hitler) and the neo-Nazi exaltation of the Croats (who praise Ante Paveli큓, another pawn of the Führer). In a disjointed and fragmented manner—uttering sloppy platitudes and falsified historical data, sinking knee-deep into the most primitive and reactionary atavistic prejudices—these movements share a common basis: an extreme right-wing ideology that seeks to legitimize the neo-colonial domination of the great Western powers and the super-exploitation of the working class in the Global South.
Following this nauseating thread, in the so-called “new Europe” of the 21st century, an extremist mass conservatism has emerged—brutally xenophobic, Islamophobic, and unashamedly nostalgic for the fascist, Nazi, and Francoist counter-revolutions of the first half of the 20th century.
The “bait” used to justify xenophobia and supremacist aspirations lies in the claim that millions of Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Hindus, and Asians (accompanied by no few “Sudacas” from Latin America) have flocked en masse to the capitalist metropolises of the West, fleeing hunger, super-exploitation, wars of conquest and plunder, and various genocides in their peripheral societies of origin.
Let us not forget that the “civilized” and “democratic” former German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in Potsdam, a few days after meeting with the Prime Minister of Turkey in October 2010:
“In the early 1960s, our country [the Federal Republic of Germany—N.K.] invited foreign workers to come and work in Germany, and now they live in our country […] We have deceived ourselves. We said, ‘They won’t stay; they’ll leave at some point.’ But this is not the case […] And, of course, this vision of a multicultural [society], of living together and enjoying each other’s company […] has failed completely.”
“Aryan” and “white” Europe felt offended, displaced, and even socially and culturally invaded by this massive dark-skinned workforce—good for cleaning toilets and sweeping floors, as well as for rough factory work, but not for sharing citizenship in the European community. At best, they manage to achieve second-class citizenship. This applies both to the Muslims and Africans arriving in France and to the Turks and Syrians migrating to Germany.
Official Europe, Western-oriented and Eurocentric to the core, for decades believed it had finally left behind Nazi eugenics and ethnic cleansing as an embarrassing “sin of youth,” yet it never abandoned its claims of “racial purity.” Today, it asserts them publicly and without much embarrassment. The masks and pretenses have fallen away. It is disturbed by the smell of Muslim-style roast meat and by the sight of metros full of dark faces, when the immigrant workforce dares to leave the suburbs of the big cities (where it is clearly marginalized) and—often with fear—ventures into urban spaces traditionally reserved for “whites.”
The rebelliousness of immigrant youth manifests itself socially in recurring waves, and the forces of repression (police and military) do not hesitate to adopt clearly counter-insurgency strategies of containment and confrontation. The role of the so-called “French school” of counter-insurgency warfare in the colonies, and the fierce repression suffered by extra-parliamentary insurgencies within Western Europe itself (in Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, and Spain) from the late 1960s through the 1970s—and, in some cases, particularly in Spain and southern France, until just a few years ago—remains well remembered.
Thus, hand in hand with linguistic, religious, and ethnic discomfort in the face of dark-skinned immigration—or in response to the rebellions of nations without their own state—the omnipresent specter of neo-fascist political reaction reappears once again: sometimes presented in its fierce and rudimentary original guise, and sometimes with an updated air of commercial “efficiency” and cold parliamentary “modernity.” It is no coincidence that these extreme right-wing forces, which never completely disappeared but have now gained mass support, combine everything from excessive street violence and shock groups to institutional participation in conventional parliamentary regimes (such as the European Parliament or the U.S. Congress), often with the barely concealed approval of the old parliamentary formations and traditional political representations of the post-war period.
The “New Right”: A Hybrid of Neo-Fascism and Extreme Neoliberalism
Without abandoning conceptual and categorical precision but moving closer in time to the “new” extreme right-wing movements of the last two decades (that is, placing ourselves in the heart of the 21st century), we may observe counterinsurgency fascisms that are once again attempting a capitalist response to the systemic crisis by promoting discourses and practices centered on xenophobia, racial supremacism, and national exclusivism (for example, in Spain and France, where Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are combined in an eclectic and even contradictory manner, without much concern for logical consistency or political coherence); others where localist and secessionist rhetoric predominates (for example, in northern Italy, where anti-immigrant xenophobia has re-emerged in the foreground and has today [2025] become state policy in Italy); and still others where neo-Nazi propaganda invokes an idealized and melancholic “New European Order” (mainly in countries that previously belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence and currently cultivate a nostalgic anti-communism reminiscent of the Third Reich and its collaborationist regimes, with the geopolitical intention of being accepted into the European Westernism of NATO).
In the latter case, the aim is a capitalist response to the crisis that is continental in nature, not merely local. Always, of course, beyond all these nuances, attributes, and differentiated models, these movements rely on a shared foundation: counterinsurgency—a capitalist shock “reaction” against communism and the legacy inspired by Karl Marx—that is, directing this response of capitalist imperialism against the organized workforce and the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist liberation movements of the Global South.
And while neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, and the extreme “new right” vary significantly in tone, rhetoric, marketing, staging, and the priority axes of their political propaganda, their economic projects are not very different. All share, we reiterate, the same axis of capitalist response to the crisis: the promotion of counterinsurgency measures (active or preventive) against social movements and rebellious political forces, as well as a policy of “shock” against the historical rights of the workforce (promoting employer-led “labor reforms,” the planned destruction of pensions, and the dogmatic elimination of all state subsidies not directed at large companies and banks).
This wide-ranging zoological fauna weaves together pragmatic alliances around this “program,” both in Europe and the United States and in dependent and peripheral capitalist countries. However, these ultra-right extremists maintain an extremely opportunistic flexibility when it comes to discussing which specific type of capitalist response to promote on a strictly economic level.
Some forces on the extreme right appeal to ideological confusion by calling themselves “libertarians.” Anyone even minimally informed knows that the term “libertarian” is synonymous with “anarchist,” a cousin of communism with which it once shared the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA or First International). However, just as the German Nazis happily used the term “socialist” to identify themselves while mercilessly massacring all the Reds—without making any distinction—the “new” extreme right of the 21st century has no problem using a term of anarchist origin to defend the employer policies of large companies against the workforce, promoting an exclusively repressive state that nevertheless strictly guarantees the super-exploitation and savage, unbridled extraction of surplus value without any form of law or legal code.
This is pure “economic freedom” (for capital) combined with little or no political freedom (for the popular majorities and the workforce). Alongside these supposed “libertarians” (in reality, ultra-neoliberals and fundamentalist defenders of market asymmetries, fetishes, and irrationalities) coexist the extreme right-wing “protectionists” (for example, the neo-fascist wing of the U.S. Republicans led by the supremacist magnate Donald Trump, or, in the French case, the National Front, now institutionalized under Marine Le Pen).
In most of these cases, this seemingly “protectionist” stance—critical of globalization—mainly conceals a great-power geopolitics aimed at countering the global rise of China, together with xenophobia directed against a super-exploited workforce of Latin American origin in the United States or African, Arab, and Muslim origin in France.
To these theoretical specifications and descriptions of the multiple nuances and attributes within the neo-fascist counterinsurgency arena—all of a “macro” nature, to which the Marxist tradition and its critical theory contribute to understanding the responses of Western capitalist imperialism to the crisis of the system—it is also worth adding other types of complementary reflections and theorizing formulated on another scale.
Such were the attempts in Austria and Germany first, and later in the United States, by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who studied family structure and the politics directed at the unconscious, thereby explaining how submissive and obedient personalities were constructed—personalities that allowed fascist forms to triumph over the working classes, their political organizations, and their emancipatory projects.[26]
These are historical-social processes in which the victims—not reading rationally a logically articulated program of specific measures but through imaginary and unconscious processes—identify with their perpetrators (not only voting for and supporting repressive and genocidal forces but even militating in organizations that attack their own class with virulence and hatred).
The same applies to the reflections of the Argentine philosopher and psychoanalyst León Rozitchner, who draws on the more “social” works of Sigmund Freud, as well as on the theoretical bodies of Karl Marx and Karl von Clausewitz, to delve into the most intimate subjective folds—often despised or ignored by the political culture of the traditional left—that allow, not in the visible field of political programs and explicit slogans but at much deeper, unconscious levels, identification with atavistic, reactionary, fascist, and counter-revolutionary forms in the social arena of class struggle.
To the works of Reich and Rozitchner, we should also add the research of Erich Fromm, who investigates the unconscious motivations that lead segments of the working classes to militate in favor of Nazism and fascism, even against their own class, finding the answer in the tendency to seek secondary bonds as substitutes for the primary ones that have been lost.[27]
Capitalist responses to crisis and counter-revolutionary offensives of the 20th and 21st centuries never operate in the abstract, within the stylized and skeletal orbit of “pure” social classes (in the style of the ideal types imagined by Max Weber), without historical anchoring in the various social formations specific to the world system.
Here we explain another of our starting points, often overlooked by publicists who use “Marxist” jargon and slang without thoroughly understanding Karl Marx’s dialectical methodology. The capitalist regime, since its very inception as a world system, has never been flat, horizontal, or homogeneous. It has historically unfolded through uneven development, structuring a system of asymmetries, dominations, and dependencies, where some social formations (and their nation-states) have played a catalytic role in metropolitan capitalism in its imperialist phase, while others have been relegated—since the very birth of the global system and its international division of labor—to the role of colonial, semi-colonial, or dependent peripheries subordinated to the colonial domination of capitalist imperialism.
Therefore, counter-revolutionary offensives have not only attempted to keep the global system of exploitation and oppression afloat by attacking the workforce on a global scale but have also lashed out against the insurgent social forces of the colonies and former colonies, as well as against the dependent societies and subjugated nations and communities of the Global South.
The capitalist counter-revolution in the imperialist phase has had as its adversaries and enemies not only the rebellious labor force but also the insurgent national anti-colonial liberation movements. Hence, counterinsurgency has invariably been accompanied by rabid racism and supremacist ideologies, pseudo-scientific justifications about alleged “inferior peoples” and “nations destined to disappear,” atavistic misogyny and patriarchy, primitive and parochial contempt for other cultures (Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, underestimation and humiliation of native, indigenous, and Afro-descendant peoples), and theocratic fundamentalisms (Protestant or Catholic, but also Zionist) cloaked in the deceptive garb of an exclusionary, Westernized, and genocidal modernity.
All these serve as justifications for imperialist and colonialist projects, legitimizing their class wars and rampant ethnocentrism—against, for instance, the dark skin of the immigrant masses who in recent years have flowed into the United States or European countries, not to mention the massacred Palestinian people—as well as their genocidal practices and the various offensives of capital.
Are these latter connotations, these “extras” that have accompanied each of the counter-revolutionary attempts, part of the DNA of imperialist, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist counterinsurgency? Or are they simply fortuitous and casuistic accidents—that is, accidental and dispensable epiphenomena?
Historical experience suggests that their repeated and systematic reappearance and reproduction in each of the capitalist responses to crisis, and in the various global offensives of the counter-revolution of imperialist capital, constitute an integral part of the social form we know as the capitalist regime. Neither genocide, nor racism, nor misogyny, nor the Western apologia for deranged and delusional “white supremacy” constitutes a “fortuitous accident” or a “singular and unrepeatable anomaly.”
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Notes
[1] Lyotard, Jean-François [1979] (1993): The Postmodern Condition. Report on Knowledge. Barcelona, Planeta-Agostini. pp. 9–10.
[2] Mouffe, Chantal (2017): “Heirs of Neoliberal Globalization.” In Chomsky, Noam et al. (2017). Neofascism. From Trump to the European Far Right. Buenos Aires, Le Monde Diplomatic–Capital Intellectual. p. 19.
[3] Traverso, Enzo (2018): The New Faces of the Right. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Publishing House. pp. 13, 131–132.
[4] Camus, Jean-Yves and Lebourg, Nicolas (2020): The Far Right in Europe. Nationalism, Xenophobia, Hatred. Buenos Aires, Le Monde Diplomatic–Capital Intellectual. p. 65.
[5] Dimitrov, Jorge [1935]: “The Offensive of Fascism and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle for the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism.” In Dimitrov, Jorge (1974): Fascism and the United Front. Buenos Aires, Nativa Books. p. 9.
Dimitrov, Jorge [1935]: “The Offensive of Fascism and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle for the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism.” In Seventh [VII] Congress of the Communist International [AA.VV.] (1984): Fascism, Democracy and the Popular Front. Mexico, Pasado y Presente. p. 154.
[6] Gramsci, Antonio (1979): On Fascism [Anthology]. Mexico, ERA. pp. 167–169.
Gramsci, Antonio [1932–1934] (2000): Prison Notebooks. Mexico, ERA. Vol. 5. pp. 65–68.
[7] Dimitrov, Jorge, in Seventh [VII] Congress of the Communist International [AA.VV.] (1984): Fascism, Democracy and the Popular Front. Op. cit. p. 155.
[8] Dos Santos, Theotonio (1978): “The Question of Fascism in Latin America.” In Political Notebooks No. 18, Mexico, ERA Publishing. p. 30.
[9] Giudici, Ernesto (1938): Hitler Conquers America. Buenos Aires, Acento. p. 145.
[10] Giudici, Ernesto (1938): Op. cit. pp. 148–150.
[11] Zavaleta Mercado, René (1976): “Fascism and Latin America.” In AA.VV. (1976). Fascism in America [Anthology–Special Issue]. In New Politics Magazine No. 1, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica. pp. 191–192.
[12] Dos Santos, Theotonio (1978): Op. cit. p. 32.
[13] Marini, R.M. (1978): “The Question of Fascism in Latin America.” In Political Notebooks No. 18, Mexico, ERA Publishing. pp. 21–29.
[14] Petraeus, H. and Amos, J.F. (2006): Counterinsurgency Field Manual No. 3–24. In López y Rivas, Gilberto (2015): Studying United States Counterinsurgency. Manuals, Mentalities and the Use of Anthropology. San Carlos de Guatemala, University of San Carlos of Guatemala. pp. 40–41.
[15] Bonavena, Pablo and Nievas, Flabián (2022): “Today’s Counterinsurgency War.” In Pacarina del Sur. Journal of Latin American Critical Thought No. 49, Mexico. p. 9.
[16] Furet, François (1995): The Past of an Illusion. Essay on the Communist Idea in the Twentieth Century. Madrid, Fondo de Cultura Económica.
[17] Nolte, Ernst (1995): After Communism. Buenos Aires, Ariel.
[18] Furet, François and Nolte, Ernst (1999): Fascism and Communism. Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica.
[19] Furet, F. and Nolte, E. (1999): Op. cit. p. 78.
[20] Nilsen, Remi (2017): “Islamophobia Takes Hold of ‘Exemplary’ Norway.” In Chomsky, Noam et al. (2017): Neofascism. From Trump to the European Far Right. Buenos Aires, Le Monde Diplomatic–Capital Intellectual. pp. 75–82.
[21] Arendt, Hannah [1951] (1999): The Origins of Totalitarianism. Madrid, Taurus. p. 442, footnote 36.
[22] Losurdo, Domenico (2019): Western Marxism. How It Was Born, How It Died, and How It Can Be Resurrected. Madrid, Trotta. pp. 113–114.
[23] Ford, Henry [1920] (1961): The International Jew. Barcelona, Mateu.
[24] Traverso, Enzo [2001] (2016): Totalitarianism: A History of a Debate. Buenos Aires, EUDEBA. pp. 22–30.
[25] Mises, Ludwig von [1927] (2015): Liberalism. Madrid, Unión Editorial. p. 87.
[26] Reich, Wilhelm [1933] (1972): The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Buenos Aires, Editora Latina.
[27] Fromm, Erich [1941] (1968): The Fear of Freedom. Buenos Aires, Paidós.