There are probably about thirty million people ahead of me on the list of desired guests for Desert Island Discs. This means that Four Green Fields by the Flying Column will never receive the wider radio audience it deserves and I don’t get to explain why I will take Moby Dick instead of the Bible and my other book will be Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, ideally the 1975 Pelican edition with an introduction by everyone’s favourite Belgian Marxist.

It is unlikely that End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will end up as among anyone’s all-time favourite books. The more you trudge through it the more irritated you become.

It is a hybrid of journalistic impressionism, virtually guaranteed to be out of date before the paperback hits the shops and some reasonable descriptions of what companies like Palantir are doing and how they profit from mass surveillance, semi-targeted killings of insurgent populations and climate breakdown. That is the least of its problems. Especially as you near the final pages, the overwhelming sense is of being lectured by a well-meaning liberal who is telling you that everything would be better if all the nice people got together. Her heroes are the church, synagogue, temple and mosque groups which organise to defend migrants. They are undoubtedly good and admirable people who often display huge courage, but they are not in the business of organising a society wide challenge to the trends Klein and Taylor identify.

A myth that has long since been destroyed is that basic capitalist rationality requires a planet that is generally habitable for most of its population. Trump’s regime, the Saudi dictatorship, the Bolsanaros and Farage have a programme of active environmental destruction and accelerating climate change. They can live in a world where a small, protected minority live in comfort and the foodless and dispossessed are contained behind militarised boundaries. The AI and fuel industries are knowingly creating a heated planet with insufficient water for human needs.

Klein and Taylor argue that today the yellow star has been replaced with facial recognition technologies and the goose-stepping soldiers by venture capitalists and autonomous weapons. They say “fascism emerges in moments of systemic crisis, conjoining popular passions with traditional authority and protecting elite power against the threat of economic redistribution from below”. An interesting point they make is that Franco, Hitler and Mussolini did deliver levels of social spending to their working-class base that the modern far right is unwilling to do, despite their societies being much richer.

The descriptive passages are often interesting. There are sections on big tech, wacky Christian and Jewish millenarian ideologies that are now virtually mainstream, how the mega rich are preparing for the ecological collapse they are precipitating and how racism is deployed to create mass support.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani is the political figure the authors take inspiration from. The sub-title of chapter nine is “Zohran Mamdani and the Antithesis of Fascism” in case you were in any doubt about their high opinion of him. They use his election campaign to develop a sickly-sweet theory of how to defeat end times fascism.

“Start from love of place; conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives; embrace common goals across difference; get outside and gather offline and in person; take on the powerful joyously; draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.”

Good luck selling that on the Garvaghy Raod.

The book limps on in this fashion to its conclusion where the epitome of anti-fascist struggle is depicted as “neighbours picking up laundry and dropping off dinner for strangers hiding from ICE…” Its central idea is that fascism can be defeated by campaigning for left social democrat politicians and being kind. There is nothing wrong with either but the book is essentially an appeal to individual conscience rather than a set of ideas to prepare the working class and its allies for a struggle for survival.

My copy will be in the local charity shop tomorrow in near mint condition.