We are happy to announce the return of the Marxisms Collective’s workshop for the 2025-2026 academic year. This year, our theme will be “Constellations of the Far-Right.” Since the late 2010s, the expansion of far-right organizations, the sedimentation of authoritarian thinking across the social and political spectrum, and the restructuring of foreign and domestic policy to enable and advance repression has been so powerful that it is hard to question if the oppositions that structured so much of the post-war liberal anti-fascist consensus still hold.

We are living in a state of flux marked above all by the dissolution of the political signifiers of the twentieth-century. This also means that the political signifiers of tomorrow are being forged today. If we are not successful, they will be reactive, violent, and suicidal responses to increased population movement, gender experimentation, economic crisis, and the decline of the American empire.

The readings we have chosen are influenced by important Marxist studies of fascism in the inter-war period, but focus primarily on the inchoate grouping of far-right ideologies today. We will draw from an eclectic set of authors who consider the ongoing competing political ideologies and formations of fascists in the present and their relation to the intersecting oppressions of race, class, nationality, and gender. Continuing our collective’s commitment to historical materialism, throughout our discussions we will attempt to relate current fascist and far-right political formations and subjectivity to the history of capitalism, the State, and class society. We invite participants to challenge the usual categories of liberal critiques of fascism (civil society, democracy, etc) and consider the concepts that Marxist thinkers have used to understand how fascism works within the organizing mechanisms of capitalist society, such as social reproduction, surplus labor populations and proletarianization, and financial versus industrial capital.

Below is our schedule for the 2026-27 academic year:

Fall 2026: Conceptual approaches

1. September 25 (RLL Commons in the MLB): Andrea Cavalletti, “The New Right Wing Machinery,” Crisis & Critique 11 (1), July 2024. (Article available here: https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2024-07-16/andrea-cavalletti.pdf.).
2. October 23: Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capital, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023)
3. November 13: Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (Verso, 2021)
4. December 4: Case studies in the far-right – reading TBD.

Winter 2027: Case studies: the far-right(s) today 

5. January 22: Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (MIT Press, 2022)
6. February 19: Richard Saull – Capital, Race and Space, Volume I: The Far Right from Bonapartism to Fascism (Brill, 2022)
7. March TBD/TBA (workshop and invited talk)

If you would like to join the reading group please email sswartou at umich dot edu or fmoretti at umich dot edu.

Shen Swartout, Felipe Moretti, Dan Nemser