Are the MAGA Movement’s Ambitions Really ‘Fascist’?

Most antifascists would agree, at least upon reflection, that fascism is defined not by its achievements but by its strategic ambitions. Think of Hitler’s Nazi Party in early 1924, at the lowest ebb of its political power and social influence. Reeling from the embarrassing fiasco of its recently bungled Beer Hall Putsch, the party’s leadership languished in jail, awaiting trial for treason, it was banned from fielding candidates in the upcoming Reichstag election, and its militia was being forcibly disbanded. The fascism of Hitler’s Nazis at that time consisted almost entirely of what seemed, precisely to the most well-informed observers, to be baseless fantasies about what it might one day achieve. Even so, the Nazi Party — discredited, devoid of influence, literally a laughing-stock — was fully fascist. The point is not that it wished to be fascist; it absolutely was fascist.

In practical terms, the Nazi Party in 1924 had accomplished almost nothing at all, and it had no choice but to adapt to the humiliation and jailing of its leaders, the criminalization of its militia, the persistence of socialist majorities in the Reichstag, and the formidable powers enjoyed by Germany’s socialist president, all protected by a republican constitution and an independent judiciary that the Nazis despised but that still restricted the movement’s activities at every turn.

To be sure, when the Nazis in the mid-1920s complied with the constitution, the courts, and the legislature of the Weimar Republic, they did so only grudgingly. Whenever they were able to find a way of circumventing the restrictions of the legal order, they did so without hesitation. But more often than not they had to just accept that the entrenched legal order of the Republic, along with the balance of power in society, restricted them and limited the scope of their activities. An intractable chasm persisted between the ambitions the fascists had in principle (some of which were set out in 1925 in Mein Kampf) and the capacities they wielded in practice. The party’s anti-constitutionalism was in this respect exclusively “aspirational” at that time, because the movement simply lacked the power to challenge the courts, to break up trade unions and socialist parties, to close left-wing newspapers, and so on. If at one time it imagined it could pull off these measures by means of a bold insurrection, the reality of the movement’s relative weakness was revealed only too vividly by the comprehensive defeat in November 1923 of its disastrous attempted Putsch.

Today, not every antifascist appreciates the point that long before it triumphs fascism may already exist, as a movement animated by ambitions that it is quite unable to put into effect. This is relevant to the debates about whether or not the MAGA movement is fascist today, or just represents some kind of threat that it could one day become fascist. Some treat this question, wrongly, as a matter of whether or not the Trump Administration can get away with defying the courts, disbanding opposition parties, closing dissident newspapers, or whether the MAGA insurrection of 2021 was ever close to succeeding, and so on. But this simply isn’t what’s at issue in the ‘fascism debate.’ What we need to assess is what the MAGA movement would do if, counter-factually, the movement were to overcome the political obstacles and legal restrictions that stand in its way. The question, in other words, is whether or not the MAGA movement would relish the chance to carry out actions of the manifestly fascist type, were it able to muster the kind of social power that would be required to mount a serious challenge to democratic politics and launch a forceful attack against egalitarian norms, policies, laws, and legal precedents. They do not have this capacity, not fully anyway, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t love to have it, nor that they do not already seek it.

Once one understands the question that is at stake in the fascism debate, it becomes difficult to deny that the MAGA movement is fascist, in the relevant sense. Really, it does nothing to hide its project, its ambitions to launch a comprehensive attack on the democratic rights, organizational capacities, and historic achievements of the working class and its various social movements. (Those who read the writings of MAGA intellectuals like Michael Anton, Russell Vought, Angelo Codevilla, Kevin Slack, Casey Wheatland, etc., will be particularly clear about this.) MAGA does not try to hide that it wants to free itself from the limits that still constrain it, including its ongoing exposure to political opposition in a multiparty electoral system, an independent judiciary, a free press, and the protest and organizing activities of viable, legally (semi-)protected social movements of the working class.

So, we have to attend not only to what the MAGA movement (or the Trump Administration) does, but also what it aspires or has the ambition to do. Four strategic ambitions, or aspirational benchmarks of strategic success, typify the political project of the fascist far right today, including the MAGA movement. Although there’s nothing special about the names, and we don’t even need to name them, we might call the far right’s strategic ambitions social revanchism, national populism, political gangsterism, and (borrowing the phrase used by MAGA intellectuals themselves) post-constitutional Caesarism. Taken together, as a coherent political project, they define the ambitions of today’s fascist far right:

Social revanchism is the ambition to carry out a sustained attack on the organizational strongholds and sedimented social gains of working-class movements (like feminism, anti-racism, decolonization, trade unionism, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ liberation, and social democracy), in order to roll back decades of egalitarian and democratic reforms.
National populism is the ambition to secure a mass base of support for social revanchism by co-opting popular anger about elites and the social inequalities that advantage them and redirecting that anger toward established democratic and egalitarian norms, policies, laws and institutions and those who benefit from or defend them.
Political gangsterism is the ambition to secure for the far right unique power advantages by deploying lawless terror (partisan political violence) and kleptocracy (extortion and influence-peddling) to strengthen the far right’s allies and weaken its enemies.¹
Post-constitutional Caesarism is the ambition to secure for the far right unique power advantages by replacing pluralistic democracy, as far as possible, with a post-constitutional strongman regime largely immune to potent challenges from social movements, opposition parties, or an independent judiciary.

To say that the MAGA movement is fascist is to say, in short, that these are its animating ambitions, that it aspires to fight for its social-revanchist mission by means of three discernibly distinct strategic initiatives: national populism, political gangsterism, and post-constitutional Caesarism. If this claim is correct, we should expect that the MAGA movement will do everything in its power — even if there may be very little in its power — to advance these strategic initiatives. And this seems absolutely to be the case.

Note that revanchism is not enough. If the far right, or part of it, were socially revanchist but simply wanted to win elections, pass legislation, etc., that would by no means be fascist. Fascism entails the adoption of (1) national populism’s fake-populist anti-establishment posture in pursuit of a mass base, (2) political gangsterism’s attempt to extricate the far right from any legal constraints on the wielding of factional power through partisan political violence and kleptocracy, and (3) post-constitutional Caesarism’s imposition of a strongman regime unchecked by effective challenges to its civic authority.

When thinking about these strategic ambitions, it is important to see that they have a certain structure. The first of these ambitions, social revanchism, is the fascism-strategy’s guiding aim; the other three ambitions are its strategic objectives, securing for the social-revanchist project three different forms of social power: national populism is supposed to yield popular support; political gangsterism is supposed to yield factional dominance, and post-constitutional Caesarism is supposed to yield unchecked civic authority.

A question of the highest importance for antifascists is whether there is (as I believe, but won’t argue here) an inherent tension between, on the one hand, the things the far right has to do to build up and maintain a broad base of popular support, notably its pretence of anti-establishment populism, and on the other hand, the things it has to do to gain the power advantages made available by terror, kleptocracy, and post-democratic strongman politics. This is a topic for another occasion, but it at least bears mentioning here that the analysis of fascism’s ambitions both can and must inform the strategy of antifascist militancy.

Endnote:

¹ The expression “gangsterism” was used in the 1930s and 40s by antifascists of different currents (e.g, Leon Trotsky, Franz Neumann, Georgi Dimitrov) to describe the use of lawless political violence, intimidation, and corruption by fascists to gain unique advantages that their more constitutionally constrained or norm-compliant enemies were unable to access.

[Steve D’Arcy is author of Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy (BTL, 2013) and Frege and Fascism (Routledge, 2025), and is currently writing a second book fascism, A Common Front: The Emerging Antifascist Counter-Offensive.]

How Many Americans are Fascists?

Fascists marching in Charlottesville, in 2017.

It is not easy to determine how many fascists there are in the United States. I think it’s fully clear that, by a considerable majority, Americans largely reject fascism, in part because they support the rule of law, multiparty electoral systems, and the basic rights and liberties ostensibly protected by the US Constitution, like freedom of association and freedom of assembly. It is possible, and actually quite common (as we see from Trump’s 2024 electoral victory), for people to be conservative nationalists, holding various racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-union views, while nevertheless also being non-fascist. The number of fascists will surely be well below the number of 2024 Trump voters, which is just over 77 million.

Even so, however, the number of fascists in the United States is obviously nowhere near zero. There are dozens of substantial organizations that are more or less openly fascist, including the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front, the JDL, and the Three Percenters, to name only a few. Moreover, the “Yarvinite” version of fascism — which fuses “Alt-Right” culture-war agitation, neo-Nazi historical symbolism (like the notorious “Hitler-Musk Salute,” recently revived by the Tesla CEO but now widely practiced on the US Far Right), and extremist “market-fundamentalist” attacks on democracy and civic equality — has been openly embraced by leading Oligarchs in the US ruling class, including Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, and Peter Thiel, among others. Yarvinite fascism may be mostly supported by a handful of criminal Oligarchs, but it does now play a key role in the Executive Branch of the US Federal Government, and has been championed by Vice-President Vance, who has been only too happy to see Musk assume a massively greater role in the Administration than his own. Its niche appeal to billionaires aside, there’s reason to think Yarvinite fascism has a non-trivial base of supporters in the general public, a fact probably due mainly to the web-based Musk personality cult, which overlaps extensively with the “Groyper” and “Incel” fascist subcultures.

It’s an unsettling, but undeniable fact that fascism is influential today in the broad public culture in a way that the Left has not been for generations. In part, the influence is indirect, as ideas originating from what we can call, for lack of a better term, the fascist intelligentsia, including Curtis Yarvin, Paul Gottfried, Christopher Rufo, and Michael Anton, have been allowed to spread via Far-Right influencers like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Candice Owens. But some leading fascists have a very direct, very large platform and command a substantial cultural ‘footprint,’ including neo-Nazi Kanye West (Ye), who is obviously one of the biggest celebrities in the world, and the Yarvinite oligarch Musk, who has used his ownership of Twitter as a vehicle for promoting fascism and white-supremacist street militancy in the US and around the world.

But suppose we want to quantify the spread of fascism’s influence, specifically in the USA? How might we proceed? You can’t just ask people, “Are you a fascist?,” or “Do you support fascism?,” because many fascists simply deny that they are fascists. Often, they claim — whether half-seriously, or simply in the mode of trolling their adversaries — that fascism is leftist, or that liberals are the real fascists, and so on. So, the effort to count fascists has to be more indirect.

I want to propose here an imperfect, but useful method for counting fascists. This week, the loosely Trump-aligned newspaper Washington Post, and the polling firm Ipsos, released a poll, and it showed — as expected — that the Oligarch-oriented, Far-Right policy priorities of the Musk and Trump Administration are rejected by most Americans. Of course, there are many tens of millions of Americans who support key elements of the agenda, even if the number of these supporters falls well short of half of the population. My question, however, is how we can tease apart two fragments of the core Trump-Musk base: the non-fascist fragment and the fascist fragment.

Luckily, the questions posed by the Post/Ipsos poll offer us a way to do exactly that. Two questions have a particular relevance to drawing the line between non-fascist and fascist parts of the nationalist and right-wing supporters of the Trump/Musk agenda. One question asks, in effect, whether Americans are willing to excuse or treat as legitimate the use of extra-constitutional political violence in the pursuit of right-wing nationalist political aims. It reads, “Do you support pardoning people convicted of violent crimes related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot?” (Emphasis on the word violent is in the original question, which contrasts with another question about pardoning non-violent offenders.) A second question that I want to highlight here asks, in effect, whether Americans are willing to support the exercise of unconstitutional, illegal actions by the Administration in pursuit of right-wing nationalist aims. It reads, “If a federal court rules that something the Trump administration did is illegal, should the Trump Administration follow the court ruling, or ignore the court ruling?”

The reason I see these two questions as the crucial ones is that a non-fascist — even one who is a nationalist and an anti-immigrant racist, who is (like Musk) “against the idea of unions,” and who thinks (also like Musk) that “racism against white people” is the only real racism — will quickly answer both questions with a “No.” Their reactionary conservative nationalism will stop decisively short of outright fascism. No, the non-fascist right-wing nationalist will say, the Administration should not ignore or defy court rulings, and no, it should not treat as legitimate the use of extra-constitutional political violence by nationalist militants. By the same token, however, a fascist will answer both questions with a “Yes.” Yes, the fascist will say, both the use of presidential decrees in defiance of the legal system or the constitutional order, and the use of extra-constitutional political street-violence by right-wing nationalist militants, are legitimate options for the political Right.

My proposal, then, is to count as “fascist” exactly that group of Americans who answer both questions in the way a fascist would answer them. To be sure, this is an imperfect way of identifying fascists. There may be some false negatives, missed by my method, and some false positives, whose support for these views is based on something other than fascism. But if we compare my proposal to the way political analysts, including some political scientists, frequently try to count the “working class” by counting “non-college educated adults,” then I think my way of counting fascists is considerably more defensible.

How many fascists are there in the USA, by this standard?

The number of Americans who support the issuing of pardons for the specifically violent January 6 rioters, and who thus implicitly (I take it) regard political violence by right-wing nationalist militants as legitimate, is 14%, according to the Ipsos poll.

The number of Americans who support the Trump Administration ignoring court rulings that identify its policies as illegal, and who thus implicitly reject the supremacy of the constitution, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, on a right-wing nationalist basis, is 11%.

Now, if my standard for counting fascists (as all and only those giving the fascism-linked answer to both questions) is a valid basis for arriving at an estimate, this would put the upper limit on fascists in the USA at 11% of the population. As it turns out, 11% of adults in the United States comes to about 28.8 million. Ideally, we would be able to “cross-tabulate” the answers, to see how many people gave the fascism-aligned answer to both questions, but I do not have access to that data. An estimate is required, and it is probably prudent to offer a relatively cautious one (more likely to undercount than to overcount fascists). If we assume, as seems reasonable to me, that at least ⅔ of the adults who gave the fascism-associated answer to the second question (about ignoring the courts) also gave the fascism-associated answer to the first question (about the legitimacy of political violence), then the number of fascist adults in the USA right now would be somewhere between 19 million at the low end and 28.8 million at the high end.

This estimate, which I regard as plausible, should be cause for alarm. Defeating fascism is possible. It has been done before, repeatedly. But it is never easy, and it is particularly difficult when fascism has many millions of supporters. An effective antifascist movement will have to build up a capacity and a willingness to fight the fascist movement at every opportunity, to confront it physically and politically, and to agitate and organize for a Left alternative form of anti-Establishment politics. The hegemony of the Democratic Party over a large section of those willing to actively oppose fascism will constantly pose problems, as the party’s apparatus and “leaders” can be expected to argue for the most narrowly legalistic and electoralist approach imaginable. They will demonize leftist militancy, and try to steer antifascists away from confrontation and a firm determination to fight. This is in part because they fear a resurgence of the Far Left more than they fear fascism, and in part because they earnestly believe that (predictably ineffectual) attempts to court a reputation for “respectability” and to seek the support of non-fascist conservatives is a winning strategy. As antifascists, we have to win the argument against these voices, and cultivate the emergence of a militant mass antifascist movement, rooted in labour and social-movement organizations, determined to defeat the Far Right and drive it back where it belongs, in the dustbin of history.

[Stephen D’Arcy is author of Frege and Fascism (Routledge, 2025) and Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy (2013).]

What Is and What Isn’t Fascist in the USA Right Now? An Antifascist Perspective

The USA is (Still) a Capitalist Constitutional Democracy

Almost (but not quite) all antifascists today would agree with the claim that there is not a “fascist regime” in the USA at this time (or for that matter in other countries where the Far Right is in power), as long as by “regime” we are referring to the type of legal and political order in place. The Third Reich was a fascist regime, as was Italy under Mussolini. The United States is currently a constitutional democracy. That’s why both legislation and presidential decrees (“executive orders”) are still subject to judicial review, and the leading public officials in the Executive and Legislative branches still rely on the multi-party electoral procedures of capitalist (“liberal”) democracy to validate most of the authority and power they wield. (Here we have to recall that the McCarthyism era of political repression in the US, the period of internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, the Biden-sponsored Genocide against Gaza, and many other periods of repression, corruption, and anti-democratic governance, all occurred in the context of constitutional capitalist democracy — so liberal-capitalist constitutionalism does not mean governance with due respect for democracy, equality or universal human rights.) Instances of unconstitutional overreach, such as by Musk and Trump, in the exercise of executive authority — which have indeed occurred frequently since the Second Trump administration took office less than a month ago — not only can be, but are in fact being contested in the courts, and for the time being the courts seem both willing and able to rein in such attempts to circumvent or override the constitutional order.

At the level of grassroots political activity and social engagement, the degree of civic freedom — while unacceptably compromised, as usual — falls within the normal range for constitutionally constrained capitalist democracies when conservative or nationalist parties are in control of the executive branch of government. Generally speaking, dissenters are able not only to join opposition political parties, or publish opposition periodicals, TV programs or podcasts, but can even organize or join trade unions or migrant-workers’ rights organizations. The persistence of these options indicates that the basic constitutional constraints that are supposed (by liberals) to hold fascism at bay remain, for the most part, in place. This is so even if it is unusually common now, compared to any time since the end of the Second World War, to hear these features of constitutional capitalist democracy attacked by high-level pubic officials, including Musk and Trump, both of whom have been willing to speak out publicly against the rule of law the existence of unions, and the separation of powers.

Three Points of Controversy

These factual claims are, I think, relatively uncontroversial among antifascists, even if some people emphasize them more than others do.

But this seeming consensus conceals the persistence of real differences of opinion and analysis among antifascists, just below the surface. The points on which there is no agreement include: (1) whether the fascist movement today is a marginal force in the USA, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of supporters (all very active on twitter, apparently), or a powerful force supported by many millions of people; (2) whether some of the leading individuals in control of the Executive branch of the US government (like Trump and Musk at the top, and others at the cabinet or top-advisor level) should be interpreted as pursuing a broadly fascist agenda, or just a conservative nationalist one; and relatedly (3) whether the militias and street-fighting clubs like Oath Keepers, Patriot Front, and Proud Boys are part of the same social and political movement as Trump and Musk, or part of a different, much less powerful movement that remains quite distant from the main centres of political power in the USA.

Does Fascism Have a Mass Base of Support in the USA

On the first question, I follow the pessimistic view, that there are not only hundreds of thousands, but actually millions of fascists in the US, who would for example be eager to support the Trump-Musk administration if it tried to postpone the midterm elections for two (or more) years, or to declare an emergency to suspend judicial review for Executive branch decisions, or indeed to ban collective bargaining. Many antifascists regard this as a panicky and overwrought worry, on my part. They claim that, were any such measure attempted, it would quickly yield to a broad social consensus that it’s not acceptable and won’t stand. I think, on the contrary, that there’s reason to believe that, although not a majority by any means, there may well be a substantial minority, comprising several million people, who would eagerly sign up to support a fundamental rupture with the constitutional order in the USA, on an ultranationalist basis. My assessment is mainly based on the fact that, in every case where Trump and Musk have overreached in a fascist direction, they have been able to retain the support of at least 30% or more Americans. The idea that there are not millions that would be on board for a fundamental break with the constitutional order, up to and including suspending elections or banning collective bargaining, seems hard to to substantiate, based on the polling.

My view, in short, is that fascism does have a mass (but nothing like a majority) base of support in the USA, a month into the second Trump Administration.

Are Figures Like Musk and Trump Fascists, Pursuing a Fascist Agenda, or Just Conservative Nationalists?

On the second question, I do believe that many of the highest-level officials in the US executive branch right now are fascists. To be specific, I believe that many of them (including Musk and JD Vance, and to some extent also Trump, although he’s obviously less ideological) are white nationalists who are contemptuous of multi-party democracy, would prefer to weaken it as far as possible in an authoritarian way, replacing the ‘elected representative’ model with the CEO model of leadership authority, and that, in Musk’s words, they “disagree with the idea of unions” and other popular resistance movement organizations, and would like to see them neutralized or to see their main activities made effectively illegal, allowing a much more routine use of arrests, police violence, and (for non-citizens) deportation of protesters or dissidents than would normally be deemed consistent with liberal democracy, even with conservatives or nationalists in power.

Of course, just as you don’t get a “socialist society” by simply putting socialist people in positions of power, neither do you get a fascist regime by simply putting fascists in positions of power.

You can have fascists in power without fascism (that is, without an ultranationalist rupture with the constitutional order of capitalist democracy). But for the most part I think people are right to think that a broadly fascist agenda — including an authoritarian-nationalist hostility to liberal democracy, scorn for the rule of law, and support for the legal and political delegitimization of collective bargaining and left-wing social protest — is motivating many of the moves of the US executive branch. These fascism-oriented moves by the new Trump Administration include (1) its attempt to nullify or effectively bypass public sector collective agreements; (2) its attempt to de-legitimize and demonize social movements like trans liberation, feminism and anti-racism, with constant talk and one executive order proposing deportation of protesters and social critics; (3) its attempt to render irrelevant the role of the legislative branch of government and to contest the role of the judicial branch (both of which are MAGA-led and generally supportive of these changes); (4) its attempt to use Leader cults as an alternative source of legitimacy, separate from the official political process; and (5) its attempt to decriminalize and legitimize openly fascist militias and street-fighting clubs.

If I’m right about this, then we should see Musk and Trump as pursuing a fascist agenda within the confines of a constitutional democracy, but continually struggling against those confining limits and agitating to weaken their public legitimacy and scheming to circumvent legal or constitutional restrictions that limit how much of their agenda can be carried out.

This brings me to the third question: Are the street-level fascist militias and street-fighting clubs like Patriot Front, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers part of the same movement as Trump and Musk? Or are they in fact part of a different, much more marginal “fringe” movement with relatively little influence and power?

Are Street-Level Fascists Part of the Same Movement as Trump and Musk?

Here I want to avoid being misunderstood. I’m not asking whether the Trump-aligned Far-Right movement is ideologically homogeneous, from top to bottom, such that the politics of the Administration is identical to that of the Patriot Front. The Trump/Musk movement isn’t homogeneous at all: it includes libertarian-fascist “Yarvinists” like Thiel, Andreesen, and Musk, ultra-nationalist nativists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, “anti-woke” fanatics like Matt Taibbi and Joe Rogan, and even unhinged neo-Strasserist fascists like Jackson Hinkle. More broadly, and shamefully, the movement even has “fellow travellers” holding high offices in the US labor movement, like Sean O’Brien (Teamsters) and Ed Kelly (IAFF), and wields real influence among “anti-woke” professors in academia, some of whom deny any affiliation with the Far Right.

I’m also not asking whether members of Far-Right street-fighting clubs and militias are themselves powerful, alongside Trump and Musk. Clearly, they are not. Then again, individual members of Mussolini’s “squadristi” and Hitler’s “brownshirts” were not personally powerful either.

The question I’m asking, rather, is whether the street-level fascists and leading Trump-Administration officials are part of the same movement. If we think of Trump and Musk mainly or exclusively in the context of the Republican Party’s machinations in Washington, DC, then Trump and Musk seem less like fascists, at the head of a fascist mass movement, and more like generic white-nationalist politicians, like former Senator Jeff Sessions or former Rep. Steve King.

Here again, I take a relatively pessimistic view (that is, a view that underlines the dangers of fascism today, not the barriers to its growth). In my view, fascism today is not “integral,” combining leader, party, militia, intelligentsia, and propaganda organs in a single command-and-control hierarchy; instead, it is “distributed,” or spread out in distinct organizations or projects. But the movement is nevertheless relatively unified in that these distinct projects are willing and able to engage in effective collaboration wherever this helps advance their shared agenda. So, the behind-the-scenes coordination of Far-Right militias with the Trump Administration before and during the January 6 putsch should be seen as an indication that, though independently operating, there is a singular movement of the US Far Right, led by Trump (and now Musk), which is able to see itself as a single movement, and to act accordingly. Despite its distributed, non-integral character, the US Far Right is arguably much more unitary and coordinated than any social movement that the US Left has had at its disposal in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Trump may or may not be subjectively fascist, in the sense of personally identifying with the fascist tradition. (He has instead publicly associated himself with Bonapartism, which is related, but different in ways that I cannot now discuss.) But, like Musk, who has for his part done more to cultivate a fascist public persona, Trump is part of a militant US Far-Right movement which is in fact a (non-integral) fascist movement, pursuing a fascist agenda to shift the USA away from liberal democracy and democratic equality, to weaken or criminalize labour and social movement resistance activity, and to delegitimize (left-wing) dissent, protest, and social criticism.

Concluding Thoughts

Tying these strands together somewhat, and returning to my opening question, does the Musk and Trump-led government constitute a fascist regime? No, it does not, for the reasons I gave in my first two paragraphs. The US remains a constitutional capitalist democracy, and this constitutional order does not (now) seem on the brink of collapse. On the contrary, it seems fairly robust, even though it is being seriously pressured and strained. So, there’s no fascist regime. But fascist politics is fully back at the centre of US politics, and it is seemingly a very major force, with a mass base of support. The US government’s Executive branch, along with the Supreme Court and the US Congress, are dominated by an alliance of fascists and fascism-aligned conservatives. True, some of the latter group would probably prefer that the Far Right rule in a constitutional way, consistent with the constraints typical of capitalist-democratic constitutional orders. They would prefer that Trump and Musk rule in the way Reagan and Thatcher did: hostile to democracy and the left, of course, but compliant with the inherited constitutional order, more or less.

But this is exactly the problem at the root of fascism’s rise: the neoliberal “regime of accumulation” that Reagan and Thatcher promoted is no longer, since the 2008 financial crisis, able to secure the public support needed to win electoral majorities for the Right, or even the Centre. Now, political parties that promise the public more and more neoliberalism are at a tremendous disadvantage. Only a populist appeal to the public’s thirst for change and a challenge to elites can win broad public support. Trump won the election because he was willing to assume an anti-Establishment posture, albeit in the fakest way possible, while the Democrats would rather lose election after election than even pretend to turn against neoliberal economics. And that’s why antifascists know that the Democratic Party could never play a role in fighting the Far Right: Democrats always fear the Left, even the mildest social-democratic Left, more than they fear the Far Right. The Democrats worry, with some justification, that parts of the Left might mean it when they propose to contest the Establishment and target the billionaire class, whereas no one is safer than a billionaire in a government led by right-wing populists. And protecting the rich and powerful is the one core value shared by both Republicans and Democrats in the USA today.

Joining Other Imperialist Countries, Canada Responds to the ICJ Ruling by Attempting to Block Aid to Gaza

By Steve D’Arcy (29 January 2024)

This past Friday (26 January 2024), Canada’s much-reviled Liberal government waited only hours before openly, shamelessly joining other imperialist countries, most with a long history of settler-colonial genocide under their belts, in a coordinated attempt to thwart a direct order of the International Court of Justice.

The Court had only hours earlier sought to intervene in Israel’s military onslaught against Gaza, demanding that Israel take swift action to prevent genocide, insisting among other things that Israel must allow urgently needed humanitarian assistance to flow into Gaza. Canada’s government, far from expressing support for the Court’s decision, which it did not do, actually took the opposite tack: cynically attacking the most important provider of life-saving aid and emergency relief for Palestinians in Gaza.

Joining the USA, Germany and several other countries, Canada announced it would withdraw urgently needed funding from the UN relief organization, UNRWA, which is the main source of humanitarian assistance, food, and emergency shelter for the almost 2 million displaced people in Gaza, most of whom are experiencing critical, life-threatening shortages of food, drinking water, and medical care.

On Friday morning, the Court (commonly referred to as the World Court at the Hague) had issued an interim order requiring that Israel do everything in its power to prevent genocide in Gaza, and prevent or punish incitement of genocide. The timing of Canada’s intervention to thwart the Court strongly suggests that its intent was to signal, both symbolically and materially, that countries sponsoring Israel’s war would not allow a cessation of the deadly siege of Gaza before Israel has accomplished its aims, the very aims which had earlier in the day been found by the Court to be plausibly described as “genocidal.”

The reasons for the Court’s intervention on Friday morning are worth recalling in some detail.

In explaining its reasoning (hereafter cited as “ICJ”), the Court noted that, according to South Africa’s application, Israel is, with genocidal intent, “killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, and [enacting] the forcible displacement of people in Gaza” (ICJ, p. 10). If these allegations from the South African legal team are true, then Israel is in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (commonly called the “Genocide Convention”), to which both Israel and South Africa are signatories. The Convention expressly prohibits such genocidal actions and requires signatory countries to actively prevent them. It also requires countries to punish those who incite genocidal acts.

Weighing the evidence presented by South Africa, and the defence mounted by Israel, the Court determined that South Africa had made a plausible case that the Palestinian people in Gaza were at risk of genocide at the hands of Israel. In particular, the Court noted that “with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts,” South Africa’s evidence was sufficiently convincing that the Court found it necessary to act, and to order necessary measures to protect Gaza from the threat of genocide.

As evidence for its findings, the Court cited information provided by officials, agencies, and rapporteurs of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, most of which were brought forward initially by the South African legal team. For instance, the Court cited the statement made by a UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, earlier in January:

Gaza has become a place of death and despair. Families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet. Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack. The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety. A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner. For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out. Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence while the world watches on.
Quoted in ICJ, p. 16.

The Court also took note of comments by Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, earlier in January:

This war affected more than 2 million people — the entire population of Gaza. Many will carry lifelong scars, both physical and psychological . The vast majority, including children, are deeply traumatized.

Overcrowded and unsanitary UNRWA shelters have now become home to more than 1.4 million people. They lack everything, from food to hygiene to privacy. People live in inhumane conditions, where diseases are spreading, including among children. They live through the unlivable, with the clock ticking fast towards famine.

The plight of children in Gaza is especially heartbreaking. An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.
Quoted in ICJ, p. 17.

The Court also considered numerous statements by Israeli officials at the very highest level which appeared to be explicit declarations of the regime’s genocidal intent in Gaza. Two (of many) examples will suffice to convey their basic character. The first is from Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister responsible for the regime’s use of Armed Force. The day after announcing that Gaza would be cut off from all electricity, food, fuel, and medical supplies, Gallant declared:

I have released all restraints. You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against. Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.
Quoted in ICJ, p. 17.

A second example noted by the Court is the statement of explicit genocidal intent by the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, who declared openly that the aim of the war is to “break the backbone” of “an entire nation,” explicitly including the entirety of non-combatant Palestinian civilians:

Unequivocally it is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état. But we are at war. We are at war. We are at war. We are defending our homes. We are protecting our homes. That’s the truth. And when a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we’ll break their backbone.
Quoted in ICJ, pp. 17-18.

In light of the systematic destruction of Gaza, and the catastrophic level of death, disease, trauma and extreme hunger, the Court stated that it “considers that the civilian population in the Gaza Strip remains extremely vulnerable. It recalls that the military operation conducted by Israel after 7 October 2023 has resulted … in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, medical facilities and other vital infrastructure, as well as displacement on a massive scale” (ICJ, p. 22). Accordingly, the Court found that “that there is urgency, in the sense that there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible” (ICJ, p. 22), namely, “the right to be protected from genocide and related prohibited acts” (ICJ, p. 21).

On these grounds, the Court judged that it was obligated to intervene, by issuing six provisional orders, which it sets out as follows:

The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all [prohibited] acts…, in particular:
- killing members of the group;
- causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
- imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above [namely, killing members of the group, etc.];
The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.
The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip;
The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;
The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order.

— ICJ, pp. 24-26.

Now, the most notable of these provisions are the initial ones: first, that Israel is ordered to take all measures in its power to prevent the commission of genocidal acts, and second, that in particular Israel must ensure that its military does not engage in “killing members of the group [Palestinians in Gaza],” nor “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” nor “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (ICJ, p. 23).

These requirements seem to go beyond the one thing the Court did not mention, a “ceasefire.” In a ceasefire scenario, Israel could certainly continue “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” notably by continuing its total siege of Gaza, its denial to Gaza of desperately needed food, drinkable water, energy, and medicine. The Court bluntly required Israel’s regime to stop killing and injuring people in Gaza, and to stop inflicting conditions of hunger, thirst and disease on them. Even so, it is fair to criticize the Court for leaving the issue of a ceasefire out of its decision: its omission leave a wider range of options open to those hoping to thwart its aims in issuing the order, the protection Gaza from the threat of genocide.

Israel’s response to the Court’s initial findings (of plausibility) and provisional orders, in public, has been to dismiss the Court. Netanyahu, the regime’s Prime Minister, stated in a video response in English that Israel had “a sacred commitment to continue” its military onslaught against Gaza, which he described as defensive. Netanyahu cited as justification for his defiance of the Court’s order to cease killing people in Gaza Israel’s “inherent right to defend itself.” The charge of genocide, he claimed, is “outrageous.”

But — as noted at the outset, above — the regime’s public repudiation of the Court’s findings and provisional orders was bolstered by a simultaneous multilateral response undertaken by Israel and its main sponsor states, including Canada. It took the form of a morally shocking attempt to block efforts by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. As noted above, UNRWA is the most important provider of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, by far. Currently at least 1.3 million residents of Gaza are living in camps operated by UNRWA, which is trying to provide minimal shelter to those displaced by the devastating military onslaught of the past 100+ days.

The two-phased multilateral attack on UNRWA unfolded very quickly, over a period of hours, timed carefully to serve as an immediate, very high-profile rejoinder to the Court’s ruling. (Among other things, the timing was apparently an offer of cover to racist news media outlets that wanted to minimize coverage of the ICJ ruling.)

Israel initiated the first phase by issuing an accusation on Friday morning, which it said was based on “interrogations of militants” (and here it would be irresponsible not to mention the documentation by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which shows that Israel security officials use torture and abuse during interrogations). Israel alleged that, of the 30,000 employees of UNRWA (13,000 of whom work in Gaza), as many as a dozen may have participated in or somehow assisted the 7 October armed attack on Israel, which illegally killed 766 civilians, in addition to the 373 Israeli armed combatants who were killed during the battle, according to numbers published by the Israeli government. These accusations of criminal conduct against 12 UNRWA employees may or may not be substantiated in the coming weeks, but UNRWA fired all of the (surviving) individuals in any case, simply on the basis that an accusation had been made against them.

The second phase of the multilateral response to the Court’s ruling involved at least ten countries taking coordinated action against UNRWA to starve it of the funds it needs to operate in Gaza, using Israel’s accusations against the 12 UNRWA employees as pretext. Predictably, the list of countries participating mostly reads like a “who’s who” of the history of colonial genocide: Canada, Germany, USA, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Finland, and Switzerland. The Gang of Ten countries announced in tandem that they would cut off all their funding to UNRWA, amounting to many tens of millions of dollars, deliberately deepening the risk to Gaza residents of genocide, on the very day that the World Court attempted to lessen that risk. Justin Trudeau’s regime in Canada eagerly joined in, seemingly without remorse, indifferent (or worse) to the catastrophe it was actively fueling.

Now, obviously one expects this sort of behaviour from the government of Germany. For 150 years, Germany has repeatedly committed genocide, and can fairly be described as having a longstanding addiction to war crimes and genocides, most notably the Herero and Namaqua genocide and the Holocaust. The USA’s role, too, can surprise no one: Israel is first and foremost a US client state, and the two regimes collaborate and coordinate their activities in the region at every level, militarily and diplomatically, usually in the mode of “good-cop/bad-cop” role-play, with the US green-lighting Israel’s actions without having officially to admit responsibility for them. The idea of a multilateral attack on UNRWA to push back against the Court’s provisional measures may or may not have been cooked up in Washington, but one cannot even imagine that they might have hesitated before going “all in” on adopting it. The Netherlands, too, seems incapable of shaking its old genocide habit, and has exhibited in shameful ways its refusal to stand firm against genocide as recently as the 1990s. And what can one say about the UK, whose single-minded devotion to colonial genocide wreaked havoc on humankind and cursed the globe with its blood-soaked Empire for centuries?

Those who know the Canadian state — including its long history of genocidal violence against indigenous people — will be likewise unsurprised by Canada’s participation in the attack on UNRWA and its defiance of the ICJ. But even the unsurprising can still shock: in this case it can, and really it should evoke a dropped jaw of disbelief. How dare they?! Where do they get the audacity to so brazenly attempt to bully the World Court into accepting the impunity of those who scoff in private, while feigning ambivalence in public, about the scope of the Court’s authority?

It is sometimes said, misleadingly, that the World Court has no capacity to enforce its orders. What people mean is that the body charged with enforcement by the UN system, the Security Council, is permanently burdened with members from the most lawless of rogue states, most notably the USA, whose defiance of the Court may indeed go unpunished. But our commitment to basic decency, and our embattled sense of justice, is more than sufficient to point our fingers accusingly at the governments of Canada, Germany, the USA, the UK, France, Italy, Israel, and the rest. We know perfectly well that these states are led by criminals.

The humane indignation against injustice animating South Africa’s conduct only underlines the moral bankruptcy of these regimes who act continually to prop up criminality and brazen violence and to insulate its perpetrators from accountability.

Courts will not stop them, certainly. But broadening and escalating the popular struggle, in every corner of the world, offers some hope that we can do what our rulers obviously refuse to do: stop the killing, bring the criminals to justice, and enforce the Court’s order to prevent the genocide.

Displaced Gazans try to stay dry in a flooded UNRWA camp.

South Africa’s Oral Arguments to the International Court of Justice (Audio Files)

The following audio files contain the oral arguments presented on 11 January 2024 by the legal team of the Republic of South Africa, to the International Court of Justice, in the Republic’s historic attempt to hold Israel accountable for violations of the Genocide Convention of 1949, to which both countries are signatories.

In South Africa’s Written Application, Charging Israel with Genocide (Click to view PDF), the Republic of South Africa describes it’s fundamental claims as follows:

“This Application concerns acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a distinct national, racial and ethnical group, in the wake of the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023. South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’ or ‘Convention’), whether as a matter of law or morality. The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’). The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. The acts are all attributable to Israel, which has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention, and which has also violated and is continuing to violate its other fundamental obligations under the Genocide Convention, including by failing to prevent or punish the direct and public incitement to genocide by senior Israeli officials and others.”

AUDIO FILES, ORAL ARGUMENTS, SOUTH AFRICA:

Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsala (MP3), Opening arguments, I
Minister of Justice, Ronald Lamola (MP3), Opening arguments, II
Adila Hassim (MP3), Risk of genocidal acts
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi (MP3), Genocidal intent
John Dugard (MP3), Prima facie jurisdiction
Max du Plessis (MP3), Rights under threat
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh (MP3), Potential of irreparable harm
Vaughan Lowe (MP3), Argument for provisional measures
Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsala (MP3), Closing arguments

VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTS of ORAL ARGUMENTS:

“World Turned Upside Down”: Gerwig’s ‘Barbie,’ Anti-systemic Politics, and the Marxist Tradition

We quite properly laugh contemptuously when the Far Right denounces Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie, as an expression of “the woke ideology,” which in turn is supposed to be the product of an imaginary phenomenon called “Cultural Marxism.” But the brainlessness and superficiality of the Right should not stand in the way of our asking the legitimate question, could there be something to the idea that Barbie has genuine roots in the broad Marxist tradition?

I don’t want to review Barbie — it’s too complicated and multi-layered, and I don’t think I can really do it justice. But I do want to place here a few comments on the relation of Gerwig’s Barbie to the Marxist tradition and anti-systemic politics. (Crucially important aspects of the film, about mothers and daughters, about culture and self-understanding, about the relation between the culture industry and social movements, and so on, are omitted here — not because they’re not important to the film, or even to Marxism, but because there’s just too much to think and talk about. I imagine books and dissertations will be written about Barbie, and I look forward to reading them, but I’m only offering a few narrowly focused comments.)

When Gerwig’s last film, Little Women came out, I noted in my review that she was engaging with ideas central to Marxism:

The film [‘Little Women’] addresses what Marx calls the ‘two-fold character of labour,’ or what the film depicts as the two forms in which a craft (like music-making, book-making, art-making, shoe-making, people-making, and so on) can have ‘value’: first, the value of what the film calls ‘a business proposition,’ the value of buying and selling, marketing a product to a paying consumer; second, the value of what the film calls ‘importance,’ which arises when someone carefully *crafts* something *for* someone: a sketch, a story, a musical performance, a play, a book, a pair of shoes, a novel. In almost every scene, someone is producing one or the other of these two forms of value, very often both. And the crucial question, in the plot, is who will ‘save the family,’ and how? Will salvation come in the form of a business proposition or in the form of an act of crafting something for someone with care?”

In this new film, Gerwig implicitly engages again with Marxism, although not quite in its ‘classical’ version (that is, she does not engage with Marx’s ideas as such). Instead, Gerwig’s Barbie engages with an important offshoot of the Marxist tradition: Herbert Marcuse’s vindication of the critical potential of utopianism and fantasy. (See, for a brief overview, Marcuse’s essay, “The End of Utopia.”) Gerwig’s reason for engaging with Marcuse — precisely in this context — is that Marcuse pondered deeply the very thing Barbie wants us to consider: that childhood fantasies of a life of freedom, ease and self-enjoyment, when confronted with the ‘reality principle’ of a repressive society, cannot simply be taken on board as plausible descriptions of the world as it is, but they can be brought to bear as critical resources for accusing the status quo (patriarchal capitalism) of irrationally withholding from us the free and fulfilling lives that we long to attain for ourselves and those we care about and care for.

The central plot trajectory of Barbie (no spoilers!) is that a working-class Latina named Gloria (a Mattel employee, as it happens) reconfigures her relation to, and in a way lets go of her nostalgic attachment to, the utopian-fantastical impulses of her girlhood, but not before vindicating the critical importance of those impulses in the ‘Real World’ (in a double sense of critical as ‘being indispensable’ and ‘challenging to systems of power.’) Gloria’s fantasy-Barbie will cease to be ‘an idea,’ a perfectionist fantasy, and become integrated into Gloria’s real life as an anti-systemic impulse and critical resource for a fully embodied working-class woman to value deeply and fight passionately for the liberation and happiness of herself and other women, in a ‘Real World’ that for now remains determined to subject women to the ‘reality principle’ of capitalist patriarchy.

The key to Gloria’s vindication of the Barbie Land utopia — fending off the attempt of patriarchy (the Kens) and capitalism (the Mattel executives) to “put Barbie back in the box” — is to turn Barbie’s utopian dimension, embodying the young girl’s fantastical, imagined life of freedom and equality, against the forms of domination and exploitation that those systems always want Barbie to serve. Barbie forced into the box is a ‘fascist’ (as Gloria’s daughter puts it) and anti-woman source of misery, but the utopian Barbie deployed “against and beyond” the box, as a vehicle for articulating anti-systemic needs, aspirations and critical insights about unfreedom and exploitation, is a critical ideal that can embrace women as they are, while pointing toward the utopian project of a liberation from patriarchy and capitalism. In this way, Barbie Land as critical utopia of repressed possibilities for emancipated womanhood operates in relation to the Real World as counter-ideal, a “world turned upside down.”

The basic literary device for exploring all this in Gerwig’s Barbie is the duplication of Gloria into her real-world self and Barbie. Barbie is Gloria’s childhood fantasy of living perfectly, free of constraints or threats or stares or insults. But as long as Barbie lives in that mode, as trouble-free fantasy Barbie, Gloria remains stuck in a double world. On the one hand, there is who she is, as a working-class mom living in the Real World (where the constraints, aggressions, and humiliations that are banished from Barbie Land remain fully in effect). On the other hand, there is who she imagined she was supposed to be, in Barbie Land (the “perfect” world of her childhood fantasy of freedom and playful self-enjoyment).

The transition from girl to woman, from fantastical imagining of trouble-free life, to the real world of patriarchal troubled struggle-life, can take either of two forms, Gerwig’s film suggests: in the system-adaptive mode, Barbie can operate in the woman’s psyche as a generator of self-doubt, self-disappoint, even self-hatred, in which Barbie lives on as a kind of self-accusation or constant critic; alternatively, though, Barbie can operate in the as a vehicle for critical challenges to the repressive and oppressive systems that deny possibilities of freedom and ease that are in fact available in principle, in which case Barbie operates instead as a utopian impulse and a vindication of repressed needs and hopes. In Barbie Gloria and her comrades discover that this second, critical-utopian Barbie has to be take root in anti-systemic political movements, for example in the form of collective ‘consciousness-raising’ where critical insights about sexism are developed and taken seriously. But the latter, the anti-systemic and woman-positive Barbie, operating in-against-and-beyond patriarchal capitalism in the Real World, is ultimately a scenario in which Barbie has to ‘die’ for Gloria, in the sense that the doubling of Gloria into her real self and the Barbie fantasy has to give way to a willingness to say YES to actual women, including herself as an actual woman, while saying NO to the back-in-the-box “reality principle” of the Kens and the Mattel execs. Barbie has to be retired as fantasy, and that means also that Barbie is revived as a living embrace of embodied women struggling to break out of the “box” of repressive patriarchal capitalism.

In the end, the journey of Gloria — the main character, in so far as Barbie is a part of Gloria — along the ‘pink brick road’ is a journey of integrating something that has come to seem alien to her: a childhood fantasy that imagined life as playful freedom and being-oneself whole-heartedly. What the film argues is that women and girls have to actively integrate Barbie into the Real World, in the form of a kind of feminist critique and refusal of patriarchy, a reassertion and vindication of the relevance and the emancipatory-utopian energies of those childhood fantasies of freedom and fulfillment.

Anyway, Gerwig’s turn from Marx (in Little Women) to Marcuse (in Barbie) is interesting, even if it is bound to be controversial among Marxists. I think it suits Barbie — which for obvious reasons foregrounds the play and fantasy dimension, so important to Marcuse. It is arguably a dimension of the broad Marxist tradition that is more relevant to the stakes here. But does Barbie do enough to think through Gloria’s situation as a working-class woman? To be sure, the figures of ‘President Barbie’ and ‘Supreme Court Barbie’ are presented as childhood fantasies that are bound to be disappointed by real-world capitalism and patriarchy — they are not supposed to be realistic aspirations. Gerwig never stoops to denialism about class: quite the reverse. Ultimately, the idealism of Barbie Land is presented as something that can go either way: if it is forced by patriarchal capitalism back into the box, it becomes a prison for women, a form of social control. But the forms of struggle that Barbie foregrounds, especially the classical form of ‘consciousness-raising,’ do not really seem, even in the film, to open up the possibly of decisively defeating the systems they ruthlessly critique. So, there are important questions that Marxism wants to foreground, questions of strategy and the sources of anti-systemic power for working-class women like Gloria, which here (for both Gerwig and Marcuse) remain in the background.

But Gerwig’s basic claim is at least one that Marxists should find interesting: that, if girls and women can protect Barbie Land from being overrun by Kens and corporations and integrate Barbie into their critical relation to the Real World, as an anti-systemic utopian impulse, operating “in, against and beyond” capitalist patriarchy, then utopian Barbie can be a vehicle of critique and refusal, and serve the self-affirmation of women against systems that continually negate them.

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