Activists contra democracy: the dangers of rightwing activism and its strategic disavowal

The word activism tends to conjure different imagery depending on the institutional and geopolitical context. However, in left progressive circles it has usually connoted something challenging towards or resistant to injustice, and aligned with broadly progressive and democratic values. As recently as 2012, social media were being lauded as a new means of progressive social change in a bouquet of other tools against autocracy in the Global South. Based on original interviews over the past five years, this article outlines starkly, and from an intersectional socialist-feminist perspective, the dangers of allowing a warm fuzzy conception of activism to divert attention from the fascist politics being enacted online across vast swathes of the Global South, including in Brazil and India.