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Title: Long Term Resistance Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: Trump, media, fascism, anti-fascism, democracy Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/long-term-resistance-fighting-trump-liberal-co-option/
So far, the only thing that has mitigated the horrifying opening salvos
of Trump’s presidency—of course the first president to follow through on
his campaign promises had to be this one—has been the widespread popular
resistance against his deportation orders, Muslim bans, pipeline
projects, and misinformation campaigns. Resistance in and of itself is a
beautiful thing because it shows that people are still alive, they still
consider themselves a part of their environment; on the other hand,
resistance is by no means a synonym for change. The State has long known
how to manage resistance, and how to factor it in as one more cost of
its policies. For that reason, rather than being self-congratulatory
when we resist, we should encourage one another to understand just what
it is we are fighting back against, what it would take to defeat it, and
how our actions measure up to the requirements of the situation.
Donald Trump is the privileged son of a wealthy family, a mediocre real
estate magnate, an effective brander, a successful television
personality, a serial sexual assaulter, an unapologetic racist, and an
egomaniac. The difference between him and most other world leaders, past
and present, is the specific sector his personal wealth derives from,
his stint as a TV personality, and the openness with which he expresses
his opinions. Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, who has long been viewed
as a legitimate leader, is every bit as racist and reactionary. If Trump
were just a man, he would be the type of person you would try at all
costs to avoid. The reason we can’t avoid him, the reason he has become
a problem for the entire world, and not just a disgrace for his family
and neighbors, is that he sits at the helm of a complex set of powerful
institutions. What we need to understand, then, is the relationship
between Trump and these institutions.
The fact that a Trump presidency feels so dangerous, not just personally
but for all society, should cause some warning bells to go off. Assuming
my readers are not wealthy white businessmen, we are all at risk under a
Trump presidency. The risks vary, and some people risk much more, but
prison sentences, deportations, hate crimes, sexual assault, queer
bashings, police shootings, pollution, climate change, and political
repression are a threat for all but the most privileged. However, those
threats have been there for a long time. Under past presidencies, we had
to deal with a prison sentence, the deportation of a loved one, a police
beating, cancer, as a strictly personal problem, getting some support
from our social circles if we were lucky, while the TV continued to
project images of a happy, equitable society.
Now, the media are Trump’s most prominent critics. Why? Because for the
first time in ages, the elite are seriously divided on important
questions of policy. Trump is not an anti-establishment figure. Rather,
the establishment no longer entertains a fundamental consensus, as they
did in the days of Bretton Woods, the North Atlantic Treaty, and the
Federal Reserve Act. The erosion of consensus is also visible in other
once stable Western democracies, signaling a possible change of era, and
at the least a serious crisis in how capitalism functions.
The fact that all the important newspapers and all the major television
stations except for Fox are fully or partially critical of Trump tells
us that many capitalists not only dislike him, they feel threatened by
him. Yet the way the media function has undergone a remarkable change.
For the first time in memory, the US media are playing the role of
fact-checkers. Just 15 years ago when President G.W. Bush was preparing
the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times and all the major television
networks freely broadcast Pentagon propaganda even though all the basic
allegations justifying the war were easily debunked.
The role of media has been to establish parameters, deciding which
candidates were fringe and which candidates were serious contenders, and
then to evaluate how well the serious candidates sold their ideas,
rather than evaluating the ideas themselves. This is because none of the
ideas under debate threatened them; they all fell within the parameters
of elite consensus.
The role of media in previous elections has been to establish
parameters, deciding which candidates were fringe and which candidates
were serious contenders, and then to evaluate how well the serious
candidates sold their ideas, rather than evaluating the ideas
themselves. This is because none of the ideas under debate threatened
them; they all fell within the parameters of elite consensus. In terms
of public policy, the media role has been to summarize the proposals of
all politicians and institutions they deem to be legitimate, casting all
the options as equally valid, and differences as mere questions of
opinion. Deftly creating a war of positions and appearances, they are
able to encourage debate without encouraging critical analysis or
intellectual independence. There is not one official view, as in a
classical dictatorship, but there is an official range of views. By
creating a visible debate within invisible margins, the media cover up
the proposals for society of any non-state actors. Under their watch,
social movements with incisive critiques and bold ideas are cast as mute
indicators of discontent seeking only to pressure the official
policymakers. In blatant disregard of reality, journalists follow a
playbook in which eloquent and intelligent social movements must be
forcibly recast as confused, angry, or simply dissident masses who
oppose existing policy without ever embodying another way of doing
things.
“What do they want?” the journalist asks, shaking his head
moralistically as the camera shows a broad shot of a protesting mass.
The audience, watching a play in which the dissidents have no speaking
parts, can only conclude that they do not know. The journalist has not
explicitly put this idea in the audience members’ heads, but by
effectively directing their gaze and preventing horizontal
communication, he has left them with no other possible conclusions.
Media methods range from subtle democratic misdirection to the sort of
extreme manipulation we associate with a Stalinist regime, but
fact-checking has never been a part of their toolbox. Trump is no more a
liar and manipulator than Bush was (does anyone remember “fuzzy math”?),
and in comparison with Obama he is simply more clumsy and categorical.
If the media are showing him to be dishonest, it is not only because
many capitalists disagree with him, but because the press as an
institution is under threat. I am unaware of any other time in modern
history when a politician won a major election despite strongly
unfavorable coverage in an overwhelming majority of newspapers and TV
networks. This is a watershed event. Facebook and Twitter are now more
powerful than CNN and the New York Times. This shift is part of the
broader phenomenon of the decentralization of capitalist production.
Opinion production is also being decentralized, and there is no going
back. From the days of consensual facts and one central arena for all
important social debates, we are entering into a world of pluralism, in
which any identity is legitimate, and any demographic deserves its own
consumer niches and news sites, even LGBT folks, even anarchists, even
neo-fascists (sorry, “alternative” right-wingers). These different
niches never have to enter into debate, the alternative facts that
support their views never have to be questioned. The only relevant
concerns are how many advertising dollars they can generate, and how
many votes they can muster. This is one of the death knells of mass
society.
the climate in which we are fighting against the government, and the
spectacle through which our movements will be broadcast back to us, is a
reactionary one infused by liberal values and appeals to protect the old
way of life.
The mass media might perish, or they might adapt by using their superior
resources to centralize nodes of opinion production within the new,
individualized, de-massified networks. All Twitter accounts are created
equal, but they quickly conform to the drastic influence-inequality that
marks the social media landscape. The relative decentralization of
capitalism is in precise terms a move towards polycentralization with
more effective exploitation of and integration into specific terrains.
It is not a move towards any true anti-hierarchical horizontalism.
Either way, the media as they currently exist are threatened, and the
greater part of their rejection of Trump reflects institutional
self-interest rather than the self-interests of the capitalists who own
the media. (As we shall see, capitalists are divided regarding Trump,
but there is no clear majority against him. ) Given that the media are
leaving happy times behind and entering into uncertain waters, they are
reflexively championing the traditional values associated with the old
system: democracy, equality, and diplomacy.
In other words, the climate in which we are fighting against the
government, and the spectacle through which our movements will be
broadcast back to us, is a reactionary one infused by liberal values and
appeals to protect the old way of life. We’ll get back to this
observation in the next section.
At the risk of oversimplifying, every government administration can be
said to represent capitalist interests. Within this framework, the
subsequent questions concern what those interests are, whether
capitalists are unified, divergent, or antagonistic in their interests,
and which set of interests will be defended by the government. What is
left out by the above-mentioned framework is the fact the state interest
of social control is prior to and supersedes capitalist interests, and
that the State systematically redefines what capitalism is capable of.
A prominent characteristic of the world today, which Trump by no means
created, is that the neoliberal consensus has ended and capitalist
interests are divergent. Meanwhile, the political strategies that seek
to protect these interests have become antagonistic well beyond the
constant inter-capitalist competition by which different actors seek to
win a bigger piece of the pie. Now, fundamental questions about how the
pie is to be baked and served are in dispute.
Given the lack of unity among capitalists, it is no surprise that Trump
enjoys mixed support from the owning class. Some have recently suggested
that Trump’s presidency represents “a victory for those sectors of
capital worst at valorising themselves.” Not surprisingly, articles
expressing such a view are short on examples, because the argument is
overly simplistic, as all positions tend to be that present politics as
the mere manifestation of the needs of Capital. To be precise, Trump has
significant support from the manufacturing, defense, energy, real
estate, and finance sectors, some of which are facing a valorization
crisis, others of which are not. These are companies with a relatively
stable place in the economy, led by extremely wealthy people who trust
that the deregulation Trump champions will make their lives easier and
their fortunes greater. Their position as cornerstones of the leading
world economy, which they have held for decades, makes them feel immune
to the rising insecurity. The global scale of their customer base and
operations will help them weather any trade wars that Trump provokes.
And many of them don’t have to be terribly worried about tariffs and
immigration bans because the aforementioned decentralization of
capitalist production means they have been starting to relocate
manufacturing closer to their consumers. Even before the elections, some
of these companies were expanding their production within the US,
cutting their labor costs below even the sweatshop level by roboticizing
entire factories. Since Trump has been loudly blaming immigrants and
taking the focus off new technologies, they know they will get a free
pass from popular anger over the new forms of exploitation they are
using.
To be clear, though these capitalists support Trump, they did not
engineer the Trump victory. They simply knew that they could thrive
regardless of whether Trump or Clinton won. The Trump administration is
trying to protect capitalist interests, but it did not arise to meet
capitalist needs. On the contrary, it arose by taking advantage of a
specific political crisis and by appealing to the most decadent of the
self-interests within the US capitalist class. In other words, it is
more an actor than a product.
This becomes clear when we examine the relationship between the Trump
administration and the capitalist sector that opposes him most fiercely:
the tech sector, the vanguard of the new economy (leaving aside the
retail sector, in which he has provoked a deal of insecurity over the
possibility of price hikes caused by punitive tariffs). It is no mistake
that of all the Silicon Valley leaders, the only one who supports Trump
is the CEO of the most pedestrian, the least innovative of all the
internet age powerhouses: Peter Thiel of PayPal. The corporate
architects of the new economy, like Google, Apple, and Facebook, may be
the only hope for capitalism to survive the ecological and financial
crises it has created. Economic growth based on fossil fuels and
manufacture, followed by financial bubbles, has had a three hundred year
run and it might be meeting its geological limits. Of all the
capitalists, only those of the IT sector are ideating game-changing
transformations to this dynamic, and developing the technologies to make
them feasible, from ethereal production to AI to extraterrestrial
exploitation.
On the other hand, AI and robotics threaten the social contract by
undermining the historic point of unity between the capitalist logic of
accumulation and the statist logic of social control: control people and
profit off of them by putting them to work. Any solution to that crisis
would require bold interventions by the State approaching some kind of
utopian yet corporate socialism (a prediction that was already made in
2009, that socialism would not result from the development of productive
capacities, as Marx foretold, but rather repressive capacities, once the
State had the techniques to surveille and control those who were no
longer kept in line by the threat of hunger).
A corporate socialism could include universal wages, the colonization of
outer space, and the expansion of the service economy beyond anything
previously imagined. To save capitalism and to avert the disasters of
its own making, the Silicon Valley vanguard doesn’t only need the
president’s ear, they need all the resources, the regulatory assistance,
and the planning capacities that the State has at its disposal. And
right at this juncture, the new president rebuffs the IT powerhouses and
begins imposing policies that directly harm them, supported by the
pillars of the traditional economy who continue doing business like it’s
the 20th century. This only goes to show that power is as blind as those
who wield it.
In my mind, the key points of this overview are that Trump is neglecting
the interests of what is strategically—but not financially—the most
important capitalist sector, but he is vigorously defending the
interests of all the capitalist sectors that were important back in the
’70s and ’80s when he was forming his worldview and his business
practices. Given that the former and latter sectors currently have
divergent but not antagonistic interests, Trump’s effectiveness and his
ability to win reelection depend on whether he reshapes his agenda to
cater to both sets of interests. This could mean limiting xenophobia to
poor immigrants and exempting international IT recruits (which relies on
the liberal, “color-blind” recipe for racism), encouraging green
capitalism alongside the carbon economy (requiring a more ambiguous form
of climate denial), subsidizing autonomous (robotic) manufacturing
within the US, and aggressively promoting space exploration and
government support for the social deployment of technological
innovations that are not currently on his radar. Silicon Valley, for
their part, will have to use traditional lobbying and also to
instrumentalize social movements in order to force Trump to transform
his agenda in the aforementioned ways.
The other thing Trump will need to do to retain support is to achieve
results from his risky strategy of bilateral trade negotiations. While
Trump is departing sharply from the neoliberal dream of the world as one
large free trade area, he is by no means against free trade. To
understand that, we need to acknowledge that free trade is no more free
than the free market. It is simply a euphemism for a highly regulated
arrangement designed to increase trade volume. This can be achieved
through the multilateral agreements like NAFTA and TTIP and the global
institutions like the WTO that were hallmarks of neoliberal politics, or
it can achieved through the bilateral trade agreements that Trump is
promoting. In theory, the former require that everyone follow the same
set of rules (though the European Union, for example, assigned very
specific economic roles to different member states, allowing core
members to protect industries that peripheral members were forced to
de-subsidize). This means that the rules will reflect the interests of
the multinational corporations that operate throughout the entirety of
the economic area. In the past, those interests were synonymous with the
interests of the US and its NATO allies, since all the multinationals of
note were North American or Western European. But over time, the
benefits began to generalize to the capitalists of all countries.
A second tipping point away from neoliberalism is political in nature.
Neoliberalism was doomed by the institutional primacy of state power
over financial power. A globalized economy needs a global state to
regulate it, but power-holders are still firmly national. Their
worldviews and interests are developed at the national level, and nearly
all their institutional handles pertain to nation-states. In a
shortsighted maneuver to maintain their own chauvinistic supremacy, US
conservatives gutted the UN—the potential world government—and therefore
sabotaged the very world order they put in motion after WWII.
While all other politicians were inclined to adhere to a neoliberal
strategy that immensely benefited the US but allowed US supremacy to
slowly slip away, Trump is making a gamble. The US is no longer the
number one global producer, but it is still the largest consumer,
meaning it has a unique bargaining position: every country wants access
to the US market. If Trump can encourage “free trade” that privileges US
interests, he can maintain the US position as global economic leader and
maybe even recover the number one manufacturing spot (not by saving
factory jobs, of course, but by subsidizing an expansion of robotic
labor). If his multiple high-stakes games of chicken fail, he will cause
the US economy to tank, hasten the imminent emergence of China as global
economic leader, and lose reelection.
Trump’s relationship with the democratic traditions of the US government
is rocky, to say the least, but allegations that his administration is
fascist or even that it is preparing a coup can prevent us from
perceiving the precise relationship between Trump and the existing
institutions. Without a doubt, he has frequently breached democratic
etiquette and his heavy-handed, largely novice administration has made
more than a few embarrassing fumbles while implementing policy. But such
friction is hardly representative of a major structural shift. On the
other hand, disrespecting democratic conventions can undermine the
cultural expectations that constitute one important layer of defense
against authoritarian coups or fascist movements. However, neither
Trump’s authoritarian character nor even his intentions (or those of his
chief adviser, Steve Bannon) are sufficient to drag an entire country
into fascism. For a government to change its fundamental structures, a
whole host of structural and societal elements need to be in place. As
it turns out, none of those elements are currently present. There is no
right-wing social movement able to force a crisis of democracy. No
significant political party and no significant percentage of US
capitalists are advocating for an end to democracy. In the US and in
Europe, there is less cooperation and dialogue between political
parties, but ruling parties are still able to keep government
functioning even when they lack a majority (and in parliamentary
democracies with no tenable majority and a partially dysfunctional
government, like Spain, neo-fascist or other anti-democratic parties
have zero presence). And the executive branch is not amassing the power
necessary to override the other branches. Trump might insult independent
judges, but when they foil him, his response is to write new executive
orders that pass legal muster rather than trying to suspend the
judiciary.
Trump has created a rather unprecedented conflict with the intelligence
agencies, leading to a partial breakdown in communication. However, they
are duking it out with the staunchly democratic weapons of appointments,
resignations, and snarky comments to the press. And besides, a bad
relationship with the intelligence agencies is hardly the hallmark of a
fascist dictator.
Trump’s approach to government respects a fundamentally democratic
process, but uses aggressive measures to try to sway it, which is
something all past Republican administrations have done since Nixon. In
his case, he is empowering the most right-wing elements already in
government by normalizing previously unacceptable behaviors, while
bullying any government functionaries who do not enthusiastically
support his agenda.
To start with, he has the fanatical aid of the police. His sloppily
authored Muslim Ban—ambiguous, overreaching, ill-prepared—would have
been meekly and hesitantly enforced were it not for the eager and active
compliance of the border police, many of whom refused to relax their
guard and release their airport prisoners even after the first judicial
stays were announced. More recently, state and local police have been
burning the midnight oil to carry out massive deportation raids, now
that they can be deputized by ICE again. It doesn’t take a perceptive
wit to see how happy they are to be given openly racist, xenophobic
crusades. Every cop is both a bureaucrat and a vigilante. Their true
character shines through when we see which tasks they carry out with
bored apathy and which tasks they fulfill with sadistic perfectionism.
The police are a constant in democratic society. It’s the same mercenary
class, whether the government is left-wing or right-wing. The
opportunistic business elite, the fickle politicians, the fancy
thinkers, they can be forgiven for trying out progressive strategies or
conservative strategies for social control, but they all need the same
racist, sadistic, patriotic, inhuman police manning the wall, protecting
the balance of power and keeping the dispossessed under the boot heel of
authoritarianism.
Though the police came running to him, Trump had almost as easy a time
with the Republicans. While they were campaigning for reelection, the
establishment Republicans criticized him for his open racism, sexism,
and insults to the military and CIA. Now that he is in office,
Republicans have closed ranks behind him, giving him an uninterrupted
series of Congressional victories and showing that white supremacy and
rape culture were already inside the government long before Trump, they
just used a more polite vocabulary.
On the other hand, Trump has changed his position on nearly every issue
where he lacked party support. His deviance on NATO and Taiwan are
fading down the memory hole, forgotten amidst fresher controversies. And
he is also working with congressional Republicans to dismantle the
Affordable Care Act. He is showing he knows how to play politics, and
the role he is creating for himself at the head of the party, though he
oscillates between self-important ass and effective negotiator, bears
little in common with the totalitarian figure of a FĂĽhrer.
The Democrats, for their part, are pulling together as an opposition
party. Since the Republicans have an absolute majority, their only hope
is to play the role of the defenders of democracy, capitalize on protest
movements like Obama did in 2008, and attempt to make gains in the House
and Senate in 2018.
Significantly, the Democrats will have to beat Trump in the streets and
in social media before they can beat him in elections. They need social
movements to shame and demobilize his base, to stain his charisma, and
to mobilize an anti-Trump demographic that does not make radical
critiques of the system. For the next two to four years, the Democrats
will not be able to block him with institutional measures unless he
commits more security-related blunders like the one that divided his own
administration, angered fellow Republicans, and brought down former
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In less than one month as
president, Trump has done things far worse, from the standpoint of a
government ethicist, than the dirty dealings that forced Richard Nixon
out of office. His impunity shows that new standards are in place.
Ethics are now measured with exclusively partisan yardsticks, another
result of the polycentralization of mass society.
In conclusion, even at his most conflictual, Trump is establishing a
firmly democratic relationship with government. Nonetheless, he is
flaunting a great deal of democratic etiquette, which will have one of
two results: either the institutions respond, resulting in a
strengthening of democracy, a triumph of supposedly good government,
which will be possible only if some in his own party turn against him;
or a gradual erosion of democratic norms, which would weaken government
in the short-term but would open the door to the transformation or
replacement of democratic structures in the mid-term. Neither of these
outcomes bode well for anarchists or anyone else struggling for freedom,
requiring our conscious and intentional intervention.
Key elements of the conflict between the Trump administration and the
existing power structures mold the terrain in which resistance takes
place. Critical, existentially threatened mass media means that
anti-government resistance in the Trump era will be more visible, but
also that the media will be more embedded, constantly modulating
movement discourses. They will infuse the movement with conservative
values, in this case, a defense of democracy and democratic institutions
against the upstart politician. The spectacular heroes of the movement
will be independent judges, charismatic Democrats, and the occasional
black pastor or immigrant mother whom the media turn into temporary
celebrities, provided they say the things the media want people to hear.
The Democratic Party, preparing for a rebound, will treat the movement
as a springboard and an electoral base. Left-wing NGOs, awash with new
funding, will flood the movement with money, further co-opting its
agenda. And the titans of the tech economy, along with the platforms
they control (Google, Facebook, Twitter…), will give an aesthetically
hip, mainstream legitimacy to the values that uphold their interests.
The spectacular heroes of the movement will be independent judges,
charismatic Democrats, and the occasional black pastor or immigrant
mother whom the media turn into temporary celebrities, provided they say
the things the media want people to hear.
Protesting Trump will be the new normal, and we will have many more
opportunities to take to the streets and block the machinations of
power, but for every new ally or comrade, there will a whole array of
non-profit financing, media spokespeople, government-friendly demands,
reformist narratives, and peace police to redirect our struggles towards
the rejuvenation of state power.
In my mind, anti-fascists—or anarchists operating within an anti-fascist
framework—are accomplishing a number of vital things in the fight
against Trump. They took him seriously from the beginning, showing the
relationship between hate speech and an increase in racist,
Islamophobic, and homophobic attacks; they are convincing people of the
legitimacy of self-defense against fascists; they are criticizing the
way the principle of free speech is used to protect fascist organizing;
and they are shutting down neo-fascist and other white supremacist
events.
The extreme Right is dangerous. It is a threat to the lives and
well-being of immigrants, queer and trans people, people of color,
non-Christians, Native peoples, and those who struggle for freedom;
therefore, we need to make sure that it does not grow. All of us are
affected, either directly, or because loved ones or those we are in
solidarity with are targeted.
However, not everything on the extreme Right is neo-fascist, and every
threat requires the most adequate response. To speak bluntly, fascism at
the State level has never been a real threat in the United States, with
the partial exception of the 1933-34 business plot, a half-baked plan by
a small yet important group of industrialists that never made it past
the conceptual stages. Wherever there is a single neo-nazi or border
vigilante unafraid to take action, marginal people in the streets are at
risk, but the way power functions in the US, major, global-level
transformations would have to take place before fascism were conceivable
here as a system of government.
Because the US is a settler state, white supremacy has played its
paramilitary function in a diffuse, rather than a centralized way,
marking a key, fundamental difference with the fascist model. The
citizen, in the US model, is called on to act as a vigilante, taking the
initiative to clear the forests, drain the swamps, tame the frontier,
protect the border, and keep the slaves under eternal vigilance. They
are not a stormtrooper awaiting orders. The citizen is an inclusive,
albeit elitist, figure. He does not have to show purity going back three
generations, but rather a zealous loyalty to the cultural values of his
civilization. Therefore, he has a colonizing, civilizing mission to
bring others into the fold. Democracy, which has always been a
militaristic slave system effective at managing commercial empires, is
the ideal form of government for the settler iteration of white
supremacy.
The culture of this model is charitable: it offers itself as a gift, a
form of progress, to the rest of the world. Hitler, for example, would
never have spoken of the “white man’s burden,” that discourse that
united the more subtle, progressive white supremacists of the UK and US.
A central element of the model is cultural continuity, the pretension of
being an ancient and wise culture stretching all the way back to Ancient
Greece. Once again, stable democratic government that avoids any overt
coups is the most suited to satisfying the model.
Those who call Trump fascist fail to define what is fascist about him. A
standard example comes from Natasha Lennard’s piece in The Nation, in
which she points to “features like selective populism, nationalism,
racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak and disregard for
reasoned debate”. All of these are features shared by every single form
of far-right politics (and in fact, Newspeak is originally a feature of
Stalinism). There is nothing specifically fascist about this list.
I would offer the following definition from an earlier article published
by CrimethInc:
Fascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex
phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical
direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty
structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through
democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral
procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social
contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a
higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal
capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new
social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for
the destabilization of the prior regime.
We could also add a tendency to go to war to conquer a larger colonial
base with which to pay back the massive investment that finances the new
social contract.
Since their defeat in WWII, fascists have had a limited though dangerous
role as street thugs. They help weaken social movements and terrorize
marginalized populations, but they have not had a real chance of gaining
institutional power. The few times that they have gotten too strong and
entertained institutional ambitions, their governments have knocked them
down and put them back in their places, polishing their democratic
credentials in the process.
And what, specifically, is anti-fascism? At the risk of seeming
pedantic, I think it is necessary to review the history and trace some
patterns that continue to this day. Of course, there have been different
strains of anti-fascism. The struggle in Italy in the ’20s, or in
different working class neighborhoods in the UK and Germany in the ’80s,
produced many valuable experiences that we should celebrate and pass on.
But the most historically prominent model of anti-fascism is the Popular
Front, proposed by Stalin and applied with disastrous results everywhere
from Germany to Spain. In the early ’30s, the Communist Party had been
secretly working hand in hand with the Nazis to destroy the social
democrats until the Nazis, to the Commies’ surprise, gained power.
Reversing gears, they drafted the Popular Front strategy to unify the
entire Left, under their leadership, to confront the fascist threat,
which they now realized had become a geopolitical danger to the Soviet
Union. The actual effect was more to control socialists, anarchists, and
dissident communists than to beat the fascists. In the Spanish Civil
War, it was the Popular Front that killed the revolution, long before
Franco swept into Catalonia and Aragon. Stalin was happy with the
results: by prolonging the conflict, he eventually secured a
non-aggression pact with Hitler, and in the meantime he had liquidated
the anarchists and Trotskyists.
The Democratic Party, preparing for a rebound, will treat the movement
as a springboard and an electoral base. Left-wing NGOs, awash with new
funding, will flood the movement with money, further co-opting its
agenda.
This is not ancient history, but a model that persists today. Europe’s
remaining Stalinists can be found in anti-fascist formations.
Anti-fascists even risked their lives in a conflict between two
reactionary states, traveling to eastern Ukraine to take part in what
they imagined was a struggle against fascism, duped by the fact that the
Russian government, as a point of patriotic mythology, considers itself
to be anti-fascist.
Anti-fascism is specifically an interclass alliance (unifying workers
with the bourgeoisie) designed to protect democratic governance. When
anarchists and other anti-capitalists take part in anti-fascist
formations, they systematically tone down their deep criticisms of
capitalism and government to focus their critiques against the
aberrations that are unique to fascists. This was the case when the CNT
took part in the Popular Front government during the Spanish Civil War,
and it continues to be the case on a smaller scale today. In Germany,
anti-fascism is the dominant logic of the entire “radical Left.” There,
it is a key element in preserving German exceptionalism (a trait that
the Right and Left in Germany share), reproducing a political tradition
based primarily on shame, celebrating various state models—from the USSR
to Israel—and protecting the State from fundamental critiques.
Everywhere I have seen anarchists become convinced of the urgency of the
fascist threat and join anti-fascist formations, they cease to make
specifically anarchist criticisms of fascism (that it is ultimately a
tool of the same elite that profits under democracy, and a more obvious
manifestation of the same white supremacy that infuses all of society),
in order to join in a chorus of leftist, progressive discourses that
demonize fascists as a unique evil and implicitly or explicitly
celebrate the values of democracy.
Why radicals in the US would import a decontextualized political model
from Europe, even with the same aesthetic and the German moniker
“antifa”, eludes me. Tactical imports like the Black Bloc have certainly
worked in the past, but at least anarchists understood the purpose of
the Black Bloc, and it quickly proved to be adaptable to the US context.
What about anti-fascism as an import? It seems a strange fit. We already
had an adapted version of this model, in the form of ARA, Anti-Racist
Action. But sure, one sounds a lot tougher fighting fascists than
fighting mere racists, so at the first opportunity to claim that our
enemies are indeed full-blown fascists, it seems inevitable that at
least in certain circles, ARA would give way to AFA.
It is admittedly strange to be critiquing the urgency that has gripped
US society. Finally, people are actually feeling something, and what’s
more, they’re taking to the streets to stop the government in what so
recently was a society defined by apathy and atomization. However,
anti-fascism operates on urgency in a special way that we should at
least be aware of.
Fascist jurisprudence—and to a large extent its social
organization—works on the principle of a state of exception. In fact,
this was one of the main contributions that fascism made to the post-war
democracies, alongside rocket scientists and security apparatuses in
Italy and Greece. Democracy took the state of exception, not as a
general legal principle but as an exceptional one, and worked it into
its anti-terrorism policies as a way to control subversives, first in
Germany and Spain, later in the US.
Exceptionalism under democracy proves to work both ways. Whatever
threatens it is perceived to be a danger of unique proportions, both in
the eyes of rulers and subjects. Even people who are supposedly critical
of democracy see fascism as something infinitely worse, momentarily
forgetting that fascism is currently a tool of democracy and even in its
heyday, from 1922-1945, fascism was a tool of the same class of people
who elsewhere were using democracy to pursue their interests. By
portraying fascism as exceptional, the defenders of democracy can
obscure the root of the problem.
Many anti-fascists unwittingly reproduce the same dynamic. The default
mood of anti-fascism is always urgency. And while it’s important to
never fall into the complacency and appeasement that defined 1930s
Europe—challenging fascists’ “free speech” is a great example of
learning from the past—wild exaggerations don’t help us. For the past
ten years, I have seen anti-fascists totally convinced that Russia, then
Greece, then Spain were on the verge of fascist dictatorships, and in
the process of scrambling to meet the threat, they have forgotten about
many other vital forms of organizing and struggle. And now, some people
in the US are seriously predicting that Trump is preparing a coup. Not
only have they proven to totally misunderstand how power functions, they
have helped those in power cover up the fact that the dictatorship is
already here. It is not a political dictatorship, because it does not
need to be. It is the dictatorship of Capital, of progress, of
technology, rooted into the fabric of society so deeply that we can make
all the free choices we want and we’ll still never break free.
Another potential problem with the antifa model is that it puts a
disproportionate focus on combating certain kinds of street thugs,
certain kinds of intellectuals, and certain kinds of politicians,
without any communal, liberating practices or proposals for society. Not
only does this lead to an incomplete understanding of power, as
mentioned, it also inexorably leads to a thug mentality. Fighting
racists and homophobes is psychologically emancipating, it makes us
healthier and wiser as human beings, and it also responds to our
collective needs of self-defense and survival. But if it is our number
one priority and even a source of our identity, we will eventually
become, at least a little bit, like that which we are fighting.
Certainly not with every anti-fascist, but undoubtedly in every major
anti-fascist scene, a part of those involved become just another gang,
frequently reproducing macho, sexist, and homophobic behaviors (because
the fascists are the real problem, and every other struggle is
secondary), and more than a few times they have attacked other people in
struggle (feminists or anarchists), often for the most trifling of
motives. This often gets left out of the romantic histories of
anti-fascism, but it is a very real dynamic.
Ultimately, anti-fascism can serve as an adrenaline fix, similar to the
harm reduction campaigns that many activists have dedicated themselves
to in the past decades. In both cases, the need is indisputable and the
intentions are impeccable, but in time, a practice arises that is toxic
in its self-righteousness and blind in the way it refuses to address
root causes.
If we are fighting for freedom, we don’t need to identify specifically
as anti-fascists. Anyone who opposes white supremacy, capitalism,
patriarchy, and the State, will fight against fascism, because it
champions all of these forms of oppression. Without a doubt, though,
anti-fascism is the big new trend. We certainly won’t change that by
denouncing it as ideologically erroneous. That would only hasten the
emergence of its ugliest aspects, those that thrive in sectarianism and
that accuse any critics of being secretly in league with the fascists,
as the Stalinists did to the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and as
the identity politicians of the Left learned how to do, in modern form,
in the toxic environment of college campus activism. Because we hate
white supremacists and homophobes, and recognize the danger they
represent, we will not stop fighting them. But we can use a more
conscientious language, and a deeper, more historical analysis in the
course of that fight. We can share other methods and other critiques of
power with those who for the moment entertain a gut identification with
anti-fascism.
The need to surpass the limitations of anti-fascism may well be one of
the defining features of this historical moment. If we oppose Trump as a
potential fascist, at best we will pressure him to stay within the
bounds of democratic government, but these are more than sufficient for
him to carry out his program. What’s more, we will miss the opportunity
to expose the continuity with which governments oppress people, and we
will play into the hands of the Democrats, making it easier for them to
continue this madness in more intelligent ways after the next elections.
Obviously, none of us know the future, and nothing appears on earth that
does not eventually disappear. Democracy will not last forever. So let’s
entertain for a moment the scenario that it will come to an end in the
next decade. A crisis of social control could certainly spell the end of
democracy. While its specific strategies change over time, the State
persists, and its fundamental logic is that of social control. Whither
will it go?
I find it hard to believe that the model for institutional evolution
will be the fascist dictatorships of the 20th century for two reasons:
one technological and the other systemic. In the age of nanotechnology
and the internet of things, dictatorship is not political, it is
material. What’s more, in the pendulum of progress and popular
resistance, entire populations do actually become inoculated against
certain strategies of state power. Individual institutions tend to
hammer down resistance, but systems, as they evolve, seek out the path
of least resistance, and their movements are guided by the mentalities
of all their members. The figure of the dictator has a bad rep. Though
we have not succeeded in revolution, we have at least succeeded in
rescuing common sense from the authoritarian ideologies of the past
millennia; a vast majority of people are once again distrustful of
anyone with a great deal of power. Any system that chooses a political
strategy of dictatorship will face a legitimacy crisis from day one.
Though the ideological hardcore of the Alt Right is neoreactionary,
which is to say they support a dictator, I think the evolutionary
usefulness of a populist strongman like Trump is in shaking up a
decaying system and forcing experts to articulate the crisis of
democracy. He himself is not a model for the way forward. The model will
be technocratic states like China that are weathering the economic
crisis better than the US, and proving to be politically more stable.
The big question, then, is whether a crisis of social control will also
become a factor: will popular uprisings threaten power? In that case,
which method is more effective at controlling them – authoritarian
liquidation or democratic recuperation? If the latter, one-state China
will fail as a potential model, and the West will have the opportunity
to draw on its own technocratic traditions. Imagine a multi-party
democracy in which politicians recommend policy guidelines based on
electoral mandate, but it is the technocrats in Central Banks and
related institutions (governing everything from environmental protection
to gender relations to the borders) that draft and implement the actual
policies. As Artificial Intelligence comes to play an increasing role,
first in stock exchanges and currency markets, later in public health,
environmental protection, traffic and transportation, immigration
metrics, and so on, society will learn to accept the figure of the
neutral, perfected, trustworthy technocrat.
The figure of the dictator has been delegitimized, in part thanks to our
struggles. A side effect is that we have trained ourselves to be ever on
the defense against dictators, at a historical moment when such a tool
is becoming obsolete. In our struggles we have communicated a rejection
of politicians, and popular skepticism has gone up. Ironically, someone
who wasn’t previously a politician won the elections. We also have the
power to delegitimize the figure of the technocrat, the State itself,
and the technology that makes it possible. But only if we recognize the
threat, communicate it far and wide, and put our bodies on the line
fighting against it. Seeking lowest-common-denominator alliances and
only criticizing the aspects of capitalism and the State that are
easiest to hate is the path of least resistance, but in a revolutionary
struggle, taking the easy way out means digging your own grave.
Already, Trump is causing Obama to go down in popular memory as a
far-left progressive and not a centrist who deported millions and killed
hundreds of thousands in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and
elsewhere. Sure, Trump is worse than Obama in a lot of ways, but the
whole point is that we should never have to make a choice between
different flavors of murder and oppression. Fighting against Trump is a
cynical waste of time if it helps us forget that Trump is just the
visible face of a murderous system. And within this system, Right and
Left work together more than anyone wants to admit.
The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, in making claims to a true,
regenerated democracy, were at times saying the same thing. Leaving
aside the versions (like Occupy Oakland) that were more anarchistic and
critical of democracy, the chief difference was that Occupy was
prefigurative rather than passive. They didn’t demand change, they put
it in practice. But when the centralized assemblies inevitably failed, a
consequence of the ideological fallacy of believing there exists a
difference between representative democracy and true or direct
democracy, all that remains is a rejection of establishment politics and
an inarticulate demand for renovation.
The leftist (as opposed to anarchist or indigenous) portion of the
anti-globalization movement made a similar error. Rather than spreading
deep critiques of capitalism and the State, everyone from progressives
to Negrists to anti-imperialists focused their attacks on neoliberalism.
This was a way for unrepentant Marxists to avoid coming to terms with
historical errors, for NGOs to make fundraising appeals without sounding
like Marxists, and for elitists from the Global South to play the role
of victim, casting capitalism as a purely US or European phenomenon. A
chief part of this narrative was how neoliberalism violated the
sovereignty of poor countries through unfair trade deals. This rhetoric
is now coming back to bite the Left in the ass, with the election of a
new crop of world leaders who are pro-capitalist but not neoliberal. In
a greater irony, the protectionist discourse of the Left actually
becomes more effective when paired with the xenophobic discourse of the
Right. In the media, “anti-globalization” now means Alt-Right. So many
years of mobilizations, Social Forums, and making puppets, down the
drain.
Last but not least, the Left paves the way for right-wing victories by
systematically making promises it has no ability to keep. When SYRIZA,
in Greece, becomes the administrator of the harshest austerity measures
in Europe, or when Obama presides over the greatest mass deportations in
US history, the suppression of the revolts against police shootings, and
an increase in the wealth gap between blacks and whites, it is no
surprise that charismatic, hope-exploiting left-wing victories are
usually followed by swings to the Right.
A critique of the Left is so important, when the obvious threat is the
extreme Right, because the Left is now taking to the streets, and the
powerful institutions we already mentioned—the Democratic Party, the
mass media, Silicon Valley—will be doing everything they can to
instrumentalize and manipulate the movement we are taking part in.
A critique of the Left is so important, when the obvious threat is the
extreme Right, because the Left is now taking to the streets, and the
powerful institutions we already mentioned—the Democratic Party, the
mass media, Silicon Valley—will be doing everything they can to
instrumentalize and manipulate the movement we are taking part in.
The media want to make sure no one challenges their monopoly on the
production of facts and the management of debates. The Democrats want to
make sure we don’t use this movement to spread practices of
self-organization and autonomy, nor reveal their complicity with
oppression when the elections come round. Silicon Valley wants to make
sure we focus on the immigrants who are useful to the economy—and
therefore continue to view them as resources rather than people—and that
we don’t spread critiques about how the technologies they are developing
harm us and may well provide the framework for the totalitarianism of
the future. And none of them want us to challenge the State, capitalism,
and white supremacy at a fundamental level.
At every step of the way, we need to be thinking how to disappoint them.
In a nutshell, the combination of the self-organization of daily life
with an uncompromising attack on power is the hardest to repress or
recuperate. Rather than simply talking about what’s wrong with the
current system or making broad suggestions for a better world, we need
to put anarchy into practice by liberating our vital needs from the
market and fulfilling them in communal ways. This will help us survive
in struggle, support intergenerational communities of resistance,
develop a greater theoretical maturity… and to paraphrase a Mapuche
comrade, we can’t sabotage the State’s infrastructures if we depend on
them.
These constructive projects will be harder for capitalism to recuperate
(think alternative businesses, co-ops, organic farms) if they are
inextricably tied to a practice of criticism and attack against power on
the deepest levels, blockading airports, opening borders, supporting
prisoners, going on strike, sabotaging new technologies, fighting
racists (those with hoods and those with badges), stopping pipelines,
and delegitimizing authority in our daily lives.
Such a combination constitutes a sincere response to the dangers we
face, during and after a Trump presidency, and it also gives us the
chance to create our own long-term solutions, rather than being extras
in someone else’s play.