The riddle of the fascist sphinx and the rise of the playgrom
A section from my new book and a new article about everyone's least favourite resurgent nightmare
As many of you know, I’m currently working on a book under contract with MIT Press tentatively titled, The Player and the Played: How Gamified Capitalism led to 21st Century Fascism.
Last weekend, we saw some of the largest demonstrations in recent American history against the increasingly fascist government of Donald Trump, specifically against his law-flaunting concentration of personal power and his gestapo-like use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to persecute those alleged to be undocumented, many of whom are being torn away from lives and loved ones, some of whom are being sent, without due process and trial (let alone conviction) to a merciless dungeon in El Salvador run by that country’s own home-grown fascist president.
In the face of this (as well as political assassinations of Democratic politicians), even some of the most timid and reactionary centrists are using the term “fascism,” although largely as a slur or based on a preposterous understanding of the term informed more by Inglourius Basterds and Star Wars than any rigorous engagement with history. Perhaps any such rigour would incline them to extend their critique to the fascists currently in charge in Israel (see my father Larry’s recent excellent article on this), and waging a genocide there with the weapons these same centrists gave them? We can only guess at their motivations.
Nonetheless, I thought that, in light of recent events, I would share some work-in-progress, a section of my forthcoming book about “The Fascist Sphinx.”
To cut a long story short, in it I refuse to define fascism categorically and, instead, theorize it as a hybrid monster made of a composite of three animals (a human, a lion and an eagle) that poses us a riddle about itself and about us. Fascism is three things at once: first, an ideology or set of distinct if contradictory political behaviours that sometimes loudly boast about being fascist but are far more likely to deny it; second, a tendency within liberal democratic capitalism and its world system, where fascist violence is put into play to ensure profit and control; third, a kind of curse at work in each of us and in society at large that inclines us towards authoritarianism.
When we see fascism as all three at once, we gain a better understanding of how it works, and how we can fight it. Ultimately, an antifascist strategy would need to incorporate a challenge to all three levels.
I’d welcome your thoughts and feedback. It’s very much work in progress. But given that the book won’t be released until late 2026 or even 2027… it feels better to have this out in the world now, and in a form that can’t be burnt.
If you’re interested in this topic, you can also check out…
The ongoing podcast I produce with Faye Harvey for Weird Economies Against the Fascist Game. We have episodes with Luce DeLire, Alberto Toscano and more.
My recently-published pieces “It’s all a Game, and the Game is Deadly Real” (in Making & Breaking) and “Towards a theory of the playgrom: Deep and dark playbor and the work of fascism” (in Media Theory see also below) and “From financalization to derivative fascisms” (in Social Text).
In May, Sarah Stein Lubrano and I ran a study workshop for activists, scholars and artists “Fascist Dreams, Antifascist Awakenings” and we’re working on a podcast to share the results. On July 11, I’m convening a symposium “What is the Antifascist Game” as part of the Games Transformed festival in London.
The Sphinx of Fascism: Manifest, incipient and micro
Here is an audio version:
Fascism emerges from capitalism
The infamy of fascism and its three most famous manifestations (Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Hirohito’s Japan), as well as the triumph over it in the Second World War, make the term a profoundly loaded one. But my argument in this book is that it is important to use, in part because other kindred terms (authoritarian, totalitarian, far-right, reactionary) do not fully do justice to what it describes, in part because calling the rising tide of revolutionary reactionary politics on the world stage today fascism brings us into alignment with several generations of critical scholars and community organizers who see it as emerging from and in many ways being a continuation of capitalism.
In this sense, throughout this book I will be speaking of a uniquely 21st century fascism that is in many ways like but in many ways unlike its 20th century predecessors. This difference is at least partially explained by the fact that the capitalism from which they emerge is different. In Japan and Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, 20th century fascism emerged out of a capitalism built on industrial exploitation and imperialist militarism, a capitalism that already organized workers and society into undifferentiated and exploitable masses.
21st century fascism, by contrast, emerges from a form of gamified and financialized capitalism where exploitation and imperialism are inherent to market dynamics that appear to maximize freedom, individuality, creativity and self-actualization. 21st century fascism, then, is different in how it is organized, what its objectives are, how it takes, holds and uses power, and why and how it appeals to so many people. The means and modes by which 21st century fascism emerges from gamified, financialized capitalism is the subject of this book and can be found in the coming chapters.
The fascist story
What 20th and 21st century fascism share is this: it is a set of political behaviours (which sometimes but don’t always express themselves as a unified party or ideology) that are organized around the belief that
A majority has been exploited and abused by a minority (or minorities)
This minority has so captured and corrupted the field of culture, economics and politics that only a revolutionary change can put the world to rights.
This corruption is not only political and economic, it is moral and ontological because it deviates from the natural or god-given order, confusing and threatening to undermine the sanctity of race, gender, class, religion, family, authority and/or nation.
The tolerant and generous majority have been silent and compacent for too long and time has almost run out.
Action must be taken now, at the eleventh hour, and the action must be permitted to break the rules and laws if it must to preserve the very basis on which laws and order depend and because the scale and pervasiveness and deviousness of the threat is so great that anything less than ruthless violence will fail.
I have opted to present fascism here as a narrative because, ultimately, it works ideologically not through argument and coherence, but through feelings and stories. This is because ultimately what fascism offers its adherence is an alleviation from the discomfort caused by many of the contradictions that plague modern life: between individuality and collectivity; between conformity and transgression; between freedom and obedience; between self and other; between an us that always feels like it's coming apart and a them that always feels like it's coming closer; between hope and nostalgia; between peace and violence; between tolerance and fear; between faith and nihilism.
The abuse of discourse
One of the persistent and maddening features of fascism for those who study it carefully is the fact that its spokespeople will constantly blur these lines in the interests of making an emotional appeal to their chosen people. But in fact, fascism’s relationship to discourse is fundamentally abusive: in both the 20th and 21st centuries, fascist commentators and politicians gleefully articulated incoherent, contradictory and bizarre ideas stolen from a vast diversity of sources including socialism, Eastern and Western religion and spirituality (including the occult), bastardized evolutionary sciences, mainstream and intuitive economics, arts and literature, popular culture and sports culture.
This is all because, ultimately, fascism boils down to nothing more and nothing less than the conspicuous worship of power itself, and one conspicuous expression of that power is to show one’s contempt for discourse by using words as vehicles for power and feeling and flaunting the fact that they amount to utter nonsense.
The frequent fascist demand that serious liberal or critical thinkers debate them is a game, but not the game those gullible enough to engage would think: it is not a battle of wits and arguments but a theatre of cruelty, where the clown debates theology with the priest to mock the church: the medium is the message, the fascist flex is to win any game by playing the game of power (and often claiming it is their opponent who is breaking the rules).
What’s not fascism
As such, it is actually rather difficult to define fascism because its own representation and testimony of itself is fundamentally untrustworthy, contradictory and incoherent, especially today when almost nobody actually identifies as a fascist and fascist commentators and politicians often trot out that oldest of fascist moves (made famous by Mussolini in the late 1910s) of accusing one’s opponent of the very thing one is oneself guilty, in this case being a fascist. And yet it is important to distinguish fascism from the terms adjacent to it, at very least to clarify why I use the term.
Fascism (in spite of absurd and stupid claims to the contrary) is exclusively a far-right and reactionary political behaviour, but not everyone and all parties and political actors on the far-right are fascists, largely because many of them believe the existing political institutions are sufficient to achieve their goals. What complicates matters is that often far-right actors will mobilize strident, revolutionary and extreme rhetoric to advance their political goals, which echoes and typically contributes to the legitimacy and spread of fascism.
Almost all fascists are also authoritarian, but not all authoritarians are fascists. They share the belief that strong, centralized power must be wielded to control society, but there are authoritarians associated with many aspects of the political spectrum, including increasingly the “extreme centre” which, while not fascist, imposes neoliberalism with increasingly draconian and militarized means and curtails democratic freedoms to ensure the competitiveness and power of the nation’s corporations. In general, under financialization, no matter who wins the election and no matter how free the press is, the market rules. I’m free, as an academic, to write it because it hardly matters.
For the same reason, we must distinguish fascism from totalitarianism, first and foremost because this term was ultimately developed prejudicially in the Second World War to tar any non-capitalist government (fascist or communist) with the same slur, second because today’s fascists rarely envision or promise a society where all aspects of life are subordinated to the state, which was Mussolini’s original definition of the term. Rather, almost all today’s 21st century fascists want to reduce the state merely to its repressive apparatuses (military, police, prisons, etc.) and leave society to be ruled by the market (I have elsewhere suggested this is a kind of financial totalitarianism, but one also being advanced by liberal and democratic politicians).
The sphinx’s riddle
Because it is built out of contradictions, rather than continuities, because it presents itself as anti-elitist while it works to enshrine and empower an elite, because it capitalizes on the contradictions and crises of capitalism to deepen and entrench capitalism’s domination of society, and because it cannot be trusted to identify itself, I will in this book call upon the myth of the sphinx to bring us back to fascism’s riddle.
In the myth of Oedipus, the orphaned main character is stopped on the outskirts to Thebes by a vicious creature that killed the city’s king and holds it at ransom, with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of an eagle. Like all who would enter the besieged city, he is asked a riddle that comes down to us canonically as something like “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?,” the answer being a human, who starts life crawling, then learns to walk, then, in old age, depends on a cane. In answering correctly, Oedipus defeats the Sphinx (who then flees, dies or is killed) and continues his fateful journey to Thebes, where the citizens reward him by appointing him the crown and Jocasta, the queen… who is also his mother…
Like the sphinx (a monster) who is both three incongruous things who asks us to answer a riddle where we (a human) are also revealed to be three things at once, I want to present fascism as having three modes, which can and often do coexist. We are best served when we can keep all three in view.
Manifest fasicsm (overty and implicit)
We have in the first place what I will call manifest fascism, by which I mean political movements, ideas or parties that are either explicitly fascist (which is rare today) or that must be recognized implicitly (far more common). I have already offered a narrative I see as core to this kind of fascism and I will not be participating in debates that seek a categorical definition, although I am informed by many of those positions.
By speaking of manifest fascism, I mean to name something close to an ideology, a word I hesitate to use in this case because fascism actually fits neither of the two definitions that are most robust. It is not a coherent set of political beliefs or opinions because, as noted, it is rarely if ever coherent. Neither is it exactly that other kind of ideology: a falsely unifying common-sense explanation for real contradictions of life generated seemingly spontaneously by social subjects with the biased stories at hand.
It might be best to see manifest fascism as a cluster or cloud of particulated ideas, feelings, dispositions, intuitions and rhetorics that, like the materials that made the first stars, occasionally, by force of their own uncontested gravity, and in circumstances probably too complex to calculate, agglomerate into something that explodes.
Incipient fascism
This first answer to the riddle of fascism helps us explain the second face: the appearance of fascism within liberal democracy. This is a face of fascism that critics in the Black radical tradition named as incipient fascism.
On the one hand, it identifies the fact that, since the defeat of 20th century fascism in 1945, the liberal democratic world order has incorporated, tolerated or even imposed fascist regimes in many countries around the world, largely to ensure the continued capitalist exploitation of the population or to prevent the threat of socialism. From Pinochet’s Chile to Suharto’s Indonesia to Franco’s Spain to Duvalier’s Haiti to Amin’s Uganda, “Western” capitalist countries supported vicious fascistic dictators or formally democratic regimes that nonetheless ruthlessly excluded, murdered or oppressed large sections of the population (notably Israel and South Africa). These fascist regimes were pivotal to the profitability and stability of the capitalist world system.
On the other hand, fascism is also at work even within many of the key institutions of capitalist liberal democracy itself, for example the military, the police and the prison system, where authoritarian violence is used, typically to control dissident and surplussed populations and defend the regime of private property. Likewise, these critics suggest that reactionary and authoritarian nationalism based on racism and imperialism suffuses seemingly more benign institutions like schools or corporations where subjugated populations (children and workers) are nearly completely at the mercy of their superiors.
Others have moved towards a similar analysis by exploring the “protofascism” that is always already at work within liberal democracies, at the level of its authoritarian institutions but also in the kinds of political ideas, understandings and desires that brew, under the surface, in such societies, that lust for order, punishment and control over minorities.
Microfascism
These dark inclinations and desires, without which fascism in its other forms could not take root, are sometimes heralded as microfascism, the third face I am asking us to hold in mind. Microfascism refers to the substrate of ideas, impressions, feelings, ways of identifying, ways of relating, ways of imagining oneself as a subject and agent that organize themselves around the worship of power, the yearning for simplicity, the hunger for order, the belief in the righteousness of violence, and conviction that inequality and hierarchy are normal, natural, eternal, just and good.
Microfascism organizes itself around the idea of sovereign power (today, the sovereignty of the independent individual), around a worship of masculinity (and both a veneration and a disgust with femininity), around the legitimacy of xenophobia, and an allergic reaction to ambiguity.
For many critics, microfascism is a timeless curse, a dark human propensity that must be diligently and relentlessly challenged lest it seduce us, even in disguise (this helps such critics explain phenomena of left authoritarianism, for example).
For others, it is something that emerges in subject born into and raised under societies already dominated by authoritarian institutions, something that future generations, raised in a better world of interdependent autonomy, will be (mostly) free from.
Throughout this book, I will be asking us to keep in mind the contradictory overlap of all three of these answers to the riddle of fascism when I use the term. Like particles inside an atom, which are governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we can use this framework to theorize the result of interaction among these three elements, but not predict both their location and their movement: they are constantly in flux relative to one another.
In providing a broad and dynamic, multilayered approach to fascism as an ongoing riddle, I risk diminishing the analytic clarity of the term. I contend that, even so, my approach provides us greater critical clarity because it will allow us to better see how a particular 21st century fascism emerges from and presents itself as a false alternative to gamified, financialized capitalism at the level of political economy, ideology, social institutions, cultural meaning-making and subjectivity (the way we come to understand ourselves and our scope of action in relationship to the power structures that govern our lives).
Towards a theory of the playgrom
The journal Media Theory will son publish my article “Towards a theory of the playgrom: Deep and dark playbor and the work of fascism.”
This highly speculative paper proposes the term playgrom to identify an idiom of playfully cruel fascistic violence that emerges from, is shaped by, and also exceeds gamified financialized capitalism. Like the anti-Semitic pogroms of late-Tsarist Russia and subsequent acts of racist terrorism there and elsewhere, the pogroms appears to be a forms of spontaneous, unsanctioned majoritarian mob violence against minorities. But we must look to the deeper roots of such phenomena in both dominant ideologies and collapsing socioeconomic systems. I draw on the examples of the 2014-15 Gamergate online decentralized anti-feminist swarming campaign and the 2019 Christchurch white supremacist massacre as examples of the playgrom. As other have illustrated, these acts of mass violence, which I will characterize as fascistic, were gamified, and drew on gaming themes, tropes and communities for their vitality. But I also propose that, to fully understand these phenomena, we must also contextualize them in the current moment of gamified capitalism, and so I propose approaching the playgrom as a form of deep, dark playbor.
You can read an unedited preprint here: https://maxhaiven.com/playgrom/