Read on Twitter
. @nikhil_palsingh’s post from yesterday is a good, bracing reminder that taking stock of the threat posed by the mass politics of fascism cannot mean ignoring—or worse, buying into—the state politics of fascism (counterterrorism, surveillance, policing, detention &c) https://twitter.com/ChrisHelali/status/1347437826036670465
Here it is for those who missed it: https://twitter.com/nikhil_palsingh/status/1347366863379062784?s=20
the two are linked, in various complex ways. One point of contact is here, in the security-state reaction to mass politics that—far from being anti-fascist in any sense—further builds muscular state capacities for repression, criminalization & elimination of internal “enemies”
We know from experience that these tools are wielded flexibly and durably, and more readily against the marginalized, racialized, undocumented, etc than against right wing groups—they are projected outward as imperial adventure as well as inward as colonial management
But there are other points of contact too, which cause me to think it is also a mistake to wave away from fascism’s mass politics—the carnivalesque, seemingly farcical, cultivation of a grassroots politics
Given what we know about seemlessness between police and white supremacist groups—and the ties between the deputization of white civilian violence as popular sovereignty and the authorisation of official violence as state sovereignty—I think we have to attend to it
