Antifa Theory: Beyond the Western Metaphysics of Maturity

ABSTRACT In this article I ask whether the main traditions of Western political thought, republicanism, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism, can supply an account of human flourishing capable of sustaining a broad antifascist movement. Each tradition defines full humanity as an achievement reserved for the mature adult and treats the child as a being in preparation, excluded from the sites of genuine political agency and human actualization. I refer to this shared framework as the metaphysics of maturity. The argument links the emergence of this metaphysics to a political economy in which the coerced labor of children generated the first surpluses, financed the enslavement of outsiders, justified the subjection of women, and furnished the material foundation for the philosophical ideals of virtue, piety, reason, and recognition. Each tradition thereby carries forward a structure of subordination that fascism shares and extends to whole populations, declaring races, classes, and nations permanently immature and therefore naturally governed and disciplined. Existing scholarship on fascism has identified its patriarchal core yet rarely goes deeper that then racialized and gendered forms of patriarchal rule. I conclude by pointing toward anarchist traditions that come closest to refusing the metaphysics of maturity, often by invoking Indigenous and other non western forms of political thought.