Every Country Gets the Fascism It Deserves documents the systematic construction of xenophobic violence as a political project in post-apartheid South Africa. Richard Pithouse traces how the state, media and organised political forces have cultivated hatred against migrants, transforming social pain into organised cruelty.

The book begins with the May 2008 pogroms that killed 62 people and displaced 100,000, showing how the mob followed the logic of a state that had already begun dehumanising migrants. It documents the rise of the All Truck Drivers Foundation, which murdered more than 200 drivers in organised attacks, and the subsequent emergence of Operation Dudula and March and March—well-funded astroturfed movements that normalised fascist language and violence.

Pithouse reveals the complicity of the police, media and major political parties—including the ANC, DA, MKP, ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance—in legitimating xenophobic violence. He shows how the mob and state have collaborated to drive more than 150,000 people across South Africa’s borders in a matter of weeks, with government infrastructure facilitating mass deportation.

Drawing on the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Alain Badiou and Richard Seymour, Pithouse argues that the erosion of democratic norms, the reactivation of ethnic mobilisation, and the normalisation of sadism constitute a fascist challenge to the constitutional order. The book insists that the answer to the far right is never to move rightward, but always to build a politics of universal solidarity rooted in the principle that a person is a person wherever they may find themselves.

With a foreword by Michael Neocosmos and an afterword by Abahlali baseMjondolo founder S’bu Zikode, this is an urgent account of a country’s descent into organised cruelty—and a powerful call for a politics of human dignity.

This essay is an elegy for solidarity; a blistering call for social communion based not on grievance, but on a human ethic of care.  Pithouse’s assessment of contemporary fascism offers a masterclass in political theory, and yet there is a granularity to his words, a grasp of the pain and suffering at the heart of this crisis that cannot be mimicked.  In this way, Pithouse moves beyond the realm of the academic, into the territory of the body, into the flesh and bone and blood of the violence that stalks this moment.

Pithouse’s reportage does not simply bear witness, it offers an  activist intervention.  By writing not from the margins, but from the centre of an organised response to the cruelty of this moment, Pithouse insists that solidarity is not built on words alone.  Instead, he reminds us that solidarity is crafted in the intimacy of bodies meeting in shared spaces – not to carry out violence, but to repel it.

Pithouse is at his finest in this form; his words are succinct, urgent and yet – somehow – achingly tender. —Sisonke Msimang, author of Always Another Country

(This essay was originally published on Richard Pithouse’s Substack: https://substack.com/profile/143275356-richard-pithouse)