Fascism is back. In reality, it never went away. The surge of right-wing populism across the globe, the re-emergence of the strong leader and reactionary socio-cultural politics have severely ruptured the liberal democratic order and this politics has positioned itself as the only legitimate alternative. This march toward authoritarianism and fascism has brought anti-fascism back into public discourse, however who is an anti-fascist and what is anti-fascism remains unclear and contested.
By definition, all who oppose fascism are anti-fascist. Yet, it is fair to say, many people would not consider themselves an anti-fascist. Undoubtedly this is largely due, in the contemporary context, to the caricatural mythological image of the irrational, violent and anti-free speech antifa agent. People do not want to be associated with this bogeyperson.
However, another factor adding to the confusion is something, perhaps, more fundamental. All too often, anti-fascism is relegated to an activity, or a political strategy of a larger political project. On a basic level, the modus operandi of anti-fascist networks is the disruption and elimination of fascist politics in public life. When this has been achieved, the networks have fulfilled their role and withdraw, even if the conditions that enabled fascism to germinate have not been addressed.
Simultaneously, fascism is a material and existential threat to our enlightenment political traditions. Legacy political traditions, such as liberalism, conservatism, Marxism and anarchism, etc, all oppose fascism in their own ways. They may come together to build uneasy alliances and shaky popular fronts but ultimately these are competing political traditions. As such, their methods for fighting fascism will usually hinge on activities that advance their political interests. In other words, their anti-fascism is strategical rather than foundational in their politics.
These political traditions predate the onset of fascism, therefore are they really equipped to oppose and be antithetical to fascism, or do they embolden political logics that germinate fascism? This is a larger question outside the scope of this work, but one thing is certain, fascism continues to germinate. Therefore, should we not be thinking in terms of, what is / does an antifascist politics look like?
Fascism is a politics of exclusivity, fear and domination.
Robert O. Paxton defines fascism as:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants … [it] abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.1
It is a politics that promises a renewal to past glories in times of economic and, supposed, social crisis / decline.
Perhaps most pernicious, it is a politics that centers a deep suspicion of the other. Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction succinctly highlights this.2 For Schmitt, politics is reducible to the distinction of friend, those who share social and cultural and values and histories, and enemies, those of other and / or conflicting social and cultural values or histories. The friend-enemy distinction pathologies’ suspicion and distrust of the other. It is a politics of fear, struggle and survival of the master race – in other words, it is a binary politics and a politics of domination.
To combat this thinking, we believe that an antifascist politics ought to be a rejection of the politics of domination: political domination, epistemological / cognitive domination, environmental domination, etc. Therefore, to build and sustain an anti-fascist politics, we seek a way of understanding our relationships to one another beyond binary thinking and domination. What we are trying to achieve is a shift in epistemology. Part of an anti-fascist politics is a rejection of exclusivity. This requires opening ourselves up to diverse cosmologies. One such example is the Andean Indigenous cosmology of Buen Vivir (“to live well”). This is not a project of building an oppositional politics to fascism or appropriating Indigenous politics. Rather, it is about learning from and drawing inspiration from over 1,000 years of lived and experiential knowledge of Indigenous peoples.
Buen Vivir (also referred to as “sumak kawsay” in the Quechua language) encompasses all aspects of living well, in harmony and balance. It is both holistic and collective. According to Buen Vivir, human beings cannot be separated from their environment. Just as we rely on our environment and natural resources for nourishment, protection, and life so too does our environment rely on us as its stewards. This understanding of the responsibility of life, to care for each other and all living beings as we are interdependent, is grounded in active living practice. Living well is living well together. This holistic orientation distinguishes Buen Vivir from the anthropocentrism prevalent in Western approaches to wellbeing and sustainability. Informed by generations of Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge, Buen Vivir offers us a way of collective survival and a dignified future for all living beings. Surely, for anti-fascists, this is a cosmology worthy of attention, respect, and care.
Turning simultaneously to the idea of pluriversality, we also recognize the interdependence of diverse knowledge systems and cosmologies. As mentioned before, an anti-fascist politics ought to be a rejection of exclusivity and domination. Turning away from grand mythologies and meta-narratives allows an opening up of the space for a diversity of histories, knowledges, and experiences, existing in harmony and mutual respect. The pluriverse is the possibility of another world, organised through care and cooperation.
As Arturo Escobar explains:
the most romantic and ultimately self-destructive strategies are those that do not pay serious attention to the cosmovisions of the communities and are not profoundly in tune with the Earth, as expressed in a deep concern for the well-being and Buen Vivir of communities, the integrity of territories, and the preservation of biological diversity. Given the severe crisis that the region, the country, and the very planet are going through, only a prospect of transitioning to a nondevelopmentalist model can help us think that the unthinkable may transform into the thinkable, the thinkable into a credible alternative to what exists, and the credible into the achievable.3
Turning toward Buen Vivir as a teacher, it is clear that an anti-fascist politics must be a relational politics rather than a politics of exclusivity. A diverse and holistic understanding of collective well-being should inform every aspect of our approach.
Our anti-fascist politics then must also be a politics of non-domination. Our rejection of domination in all of its forms is also a rejection of the cognitive domination of fascism, which organises the world through dichotomies fueled by fear and fanaticism. When we think holistically, rather than through binary logic, we bring about new ways of relating to and building with each other. More than anything, our hope for an anti-fascist politics is that it is one which always seeks to learn and to build.
- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London, UK: Vintage, 2006, 218) ↩︎
- Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 2007) ↩︎
- Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 131) ↩︎
To cite this article:
Keira Anderson & Shane Little, ‘Thinking Toward an Anti-Fascist Politic: Lessons from Buen Vivir and Pluriversality,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 10 (17 Mar. 2025).
Thinking Toward an Anti-Fascist Politic: Lessons from Buen Vivir and Pluriversality by Keira Anderson & Shane Little is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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