Spectres of Fascism, Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives is a book edited Dr. Samir Gandesha, Director of the SFU’S Institute for the Humanities. It was published in 2020 but is drawn from a free school presented at the Institute in 2017. The following is taken from Professor Gandesha’s foreword:

The free school can be situated within programming that stretches back several years and specifically addresses the increasingly aauthoritarian cast of politics globally and in Canada in particular. In Canada such an authoritarian turn was closely linked to Stephen Harper’s project of transforming Canada into an “emerging energy superpower.” Broadly speaking, the Institute has focused its attention on the resulting criminalization of dissent in this respect, in particular through the use of strategic lawsuits to limit public participation (SLAPPs) and the Anti-Terrorism Act that was passed in 2015 and was designed specifically to target opposition, particularly from Indigenous communities, to pipeline projects…

Fascism is uncanny insofar as it is a phenomenon that seems to belong to a distant age in a previous century yet has been all too close at hand in the first two decades of the present one..

…The spectre of fascism returns, then, as a response to a particular financial and ecological crisis of capitalism. If twentieth-century fascism, in part, offered a solution to the economic slump via an acceleration of the extraction of absolute and relative surplus-value extraction by smashing independent trade unions and other working-class institutions, today fascism centres on a deepening of resource extraction on the very precipice of massive deskilling of labour, and widespread automation and employment of robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to wit: the prospective obsolescence of humanity itself…