Nevertheless, it can already be said with certainty that Putin’s regime has experienced a gradual evolution over twenty years from depoliticized neoliberal authoritarianism into a brutal dictatorship. It is a grotesque development out of the “normality” of capitalist society when it is subject to economic crisis, massive social inequality, and order maintained through repression at home and imperial war abroad.
This is the “normality” and familiarity of Putin’s regime: it oversees the passivity and atomization of society, the reactionary anti-universalism of its rhetoric, multiplied by the utmost cynical rationality of its elites. And it is worth explicitly calling it fascist, not only because it fits that definition, but also so that the emancipatory movements of the present can understand the scale of the global threat to our common future.
