This article challenges the analytical confusion surrounding fascism in contemporary academic discourse by returning to historical materialism. Against mainstream scholarship that either indiscriminately labels progressive governments as “fascist” or refuses to recognize actual fascist formations serving imperialist interests, the article defines fascism as the systematic use of genocidal and terrorist methods to maintain capital accumulation under crisis conditions. Building on Dimitrov’s foundational analysis while updating it for the contemporary historical conjuncture, the article traces three movements. First, colonial genocide provided the methods and frameworks later deployed in the metropole, thus establishing fascism as intrinsic to imperialism rather than a 20th century aberration. Second, the post-1945 “Fascist International” — that is, a coordinated network of counter-revolutionary forces—consolidated the liberal order, demonstrating that liberalism and fascism function as complementary modalities of bourgeois rule, with liberal governance producing the very crisis from which fascism periodically resurges. Third, as the crisis of imperialism intensifies, Palestine crystallizes the contemporary conjuncture: Zionism incarnates the most advanced fascist formation operating globally. Hence, the attitude of every political force toward the genocide in Gaza constitutes what Dimitrov termed the watershed , revealing whether it stands with liberation or with imperialism’s reproduction.
The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx have long been marginal within socialist feminist scholarship, aside from a limited number of notable interventions. Despite their unfinished character, these notebooks contain a central dimension of Marx’s late intellectual project. A socialist feminist rereading of the notebooks is required --- one that foregrounds their significance for understanding patriarchy, social reproduction, and the historical variability of gender relations, while situating them in continuity with Marx’s earlier reflections on women, family, and gender. In this light, Marx’s ethnological studies not only deepen our understanding of his late thought but also offer indispensable theoretical resources for contemporary socialist feminist analyses of women’s oppression and the conditions of their emancipation.
The debate on how to theorize the coexistence of several relations of production, forms of labor, and various modes of production in a given society has a longer history in Marxism. In the 1970s, a lively debate emerged between various schools of thought, from French Marxist anthropologists Emmanuel Terray and Pierre-Philippe Rey, to Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi and finally to South African Marxist Harold Wolpe (to name just a few) on how to conceptualize the transition to capitalism in former colonies, and how to understand the persistence of non-capitalist relations of production in those societies. One of the questions explored was to what extent these non-capitalist relations of production remain independent from capitalism, if they are dependent on capitalism for its reproduction, or if they are reconfigured and intentionally recreated by capitalist social actors in order to provide for less costly forms of social reproduction. Following these debates, the contemporary relevance of these debates for the concepts of informal labor, petty commodity production, and other forms of labor that do not resemble wage labor and involve the majority of the population in a considerable number of countries should be apparent. These earlier debates can be useful in the analysis of the interpenetration of different systems of labor in contemporary capitalism.
