On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
Jack Z. Bratich
Antifascist Politics / Gender / Necropolitics
Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781942173496
Published: January 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in
Page count: 240
Other Formats
ISBN: 97819421736259
Format: EPUB
Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
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“Bratich’s razor-sharp analysis provides invaluable answers, and in so doing, offers a crucial tool for antifascist praxis.” —Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
“On Microfascism unpacks the deeply disturbing gender narratives that underskirt our societies and create an insurgent cruelty that corrodes our human relationships. This is an incredible intervention in the crisis we are living through and calls for us to collectively look deeper when responding to the growth of misogynist, white supremacist movements.” —Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
“Jack Bratich has written a compelling and original discourse on how microfascism presents itself nowadays and how this is imbued with misogyny, the cult of death, and violence in many forms—war included. A must-read for all scholars and activists.” —Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital
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Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.



George Eastman
Philosophy / Science & Technology
The Digital Revolution: Loss of Self and Humanity explores how digital algorithms reshape our minds, lives, and society and offers a powerful call to reclaim time, attention, and humanity in an AI-driven world.
Digital algorithms are reshaping our minds and lives, trading convenience for a loss of self, agency, connection, and humanity. The Digital Revolution, based on more than sixty years of research across multiple fields—including psychology, technology, and philosophy—pursues a holistic approach to answering the question of how digitization affects us and our relation to the world around us.
The Digital Revolution takes the reader on an unexpected journey, starting from the great tech revolutions of the early twentieth century and the invention of the first modern computers in the post-World War II era to inside our very own minds, exploring the neural mechanisms of addiction, altered states of consciousness, and age-old questions around perception versus reality.
Today, despite accelerated digital connectivity and access to information, we feel lonelier, adrift in an era that consumes our time and attention. By college, most young people have already spent tens of thousands of hours on screens, immersed in a silent Digital Revolution that has quietly established a subversive foothold in our previously analog lives. You want to put down your phone, but you can’t. You want to quit social media, yet you vacillate. You want to read a book but keep picking up your phone instead. You feel like time is slipping away. These devices promise to save us time and make life more convenient, but all they do is keep us busy—and not with the tasks we want to do. Though we sense the negative impact, breaking free is difficult.
Despite clear evidence of harm, the people most affected—parents, teachers, children, and adolescents—lack accessible information on this topic. Drawing on George’s long career as a philosopher and educator, this book offers insights from personal lived experience, tracing technological shifts from the 1930s to today. It aims to empower readers to become intentional participants in this revolution, reclaiming time, connection, and self-awareness. As AI is becoming increasingly dominant in shaping our daily lives, professional endeavors, and social interactions, The Digital Revolution is both a warning and a guide to conscious change.
The Digital Revolution seeks not only to understand this development—what is “artificial intelligence” and how should we understand its role in our lives?—but also suggests how we can maintain human control in a world where digital algorithms set the tone and the pace of work, leisure, communication, consumption, and so much more.