“Centering the contributions of anarchism in our historical analysis reveals how ARA fought fascists but also provided a radical alternative to the Far Right’s war against the state. . . For Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action, anti-fascism could not simply mean the defense of the liberal democratic state against fascism, but rather necessitated its revolutionary overthrow and the construction of a libertarian socialist society.”
The article draws from a chapter of my dissertation, which is called “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”
I haven’t posted anything in a little while, in part because I’ve been working on a few proposals for academic panels and fellowships as well as revising a chapter for the Anarchism and Punk book project. I want to share some of what I’ve been writing, so here is the proposal that I submitted to the American Historical Association for a panel I am organizing on fascism and anti-fascism in the post-war United States. Fingers crossed that it is accepted and that we can present in person at the conference, which is in Philly in January 2023.
Anti-fascism exploded into the public spotlight after Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Spectacular street battles between fascists and anti-fascists in the heart of liberal cities like Berkeley and Portland led to antifa becoming a widely discussed phenomenon and a new bogeyman of the far right. Yet despite their meteoric rise to popular consciousness in the past decade, neither fascism nor anti-fascism came out of nowhere. In the United States, fascists continued to mobilize after World War II in the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian far right, and beyond. In turn, antifascists have long fought to disrupt their organizing, in part by drawing on the experience of past generations who fought the rise of fascism in Europe. As the far right spreads across the globe today, it is critical to explore the history of post-war anti-fascism and use it to inform contemporary struggles against fascism.
This panel offers new historical perspectives on the development of fascism and anti-fascism in the United States in the post-war period. Panelists argue that, far from marginal or anachronistic political phenomena, fascism and anti-fascism substantively shaped the development of American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Christopher Vials opens the conversation by providing an explanatory framework for understanding post-war fascism before turning to a case study of the Christian far right. Anna Duensing then shows how the Black anti-fascist tradition shaped Black organizing and coalition-building in the classical civil rights era of the 1950s-60s. Next, Montse Feu discusses the use of humor in US-based solidarity work to undermine Francisco Franco’s “imperial will” in fascist Spain. Finally, Spencer Beswick explores how the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation contributed to the development of contemporary antifa by situating anti-fascism within a broader revolutionary strategy. Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, will provide commentary before the floor is opened to audience discussion and questions.
The importance of this history has only grown more urgent in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building in an attempt to reinstate Donald Trump as president. Given the tumultuous contemporary political situation, we anticipate a broad audience of scholars seeking to understand (and debate) the legacy of post-war fascism and anti-fascism.
I have seen a lot of people say that the far right storming the capitol is a terrible assault on democracy and its institutions. Many of these comments conflate condemnation of the tactic with condemnation of the politics of the demonstrators. But I’m not sure that this is a good read of the situation.
Many (most?) of these people in DC actually truly believe that the election was stolen and that democracy is dead (though many of them are indeed straight up fascist opportunists). The protestors are totally wrong in the specifics of their conspiracy theories (but perhaps correct that US democracy is largely a sham)… But isn’t it true that storming a capitol building in defense of democracy against a real coup would actually be a good thing? At least arguably?
Let’s say that Trump was a more effective fascist and he managed to throw out the results of the election and install himself as the Great Eternal Leader, with support of the DC police and the national guard as well as most of the elite political institutions that might otherwise act against him. Might it not be a good idea to storm the capitol to try to remove him?
I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I think the left has been totally outmaneuvered here. Somehow many people on the left (we could say many socialists/socdems/progressives, rather than anarchists and communists) find themselves defending the sanctity of US democracy as Biden and Co. prepare for four more years of the status quo, while the far right has managed to position itself as the more radical opposition in the streets. This sets a dangerous precedent.
This is in many ways a reversal of the politics and street norms of how things played out last year with the George Floyd rebellion. How did this happen? What can be done to build a more effective left in the coming years?
Note: I probably overemphasized the fascists’ belief that they were indeed “saving democracy.” What follows are further thoughts on how to interrogate their relationship with democracy.
Saving White Democracy — or Abolishing It
I’ve been thinking about how to evaluate the far-right Capitol-stormers’ claim that they were “saving democracy” from being “stolen.” On the face of it, it’s ridiculous. The QAnon conspiracy theories are dumb and the many known fascists and neo-nazis photographed in the heart of the action are quite likely using “saving democracy” as a cover for what they really want: white power. But I think it’s not this simple, or rather, it is more accurate to say that in many ways “democracy” has always been a cover for white power and white supremacy in this country.
These reactionary white people have a very different understanding of what democracy means than we do. For many white people in the US, “democracy” has always meant “white capitalist democracy.” We know how this worked historically.
White (male) democracy has from the beginning rested on systematic exclusion of BIPOC, poor people, and women. Democracy and citizenship were originally conceived as the domain of only white male property owners. Only certain people were considered “fit” for self-government, and Black people in particular were understood to be constitutively unfit for self-government. Their exclusion was part of the foundation of republicanism (not meaning the GOP), democracy, and whiteness in the US. I’ve been reading David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy, which have helped me contextualize the historical interweaving of whiteness, citizenship, and democracy.
But democracy has always been a contested category, and it has changed over the years as BIPOC and women have fought for and won the right to vote. They have not simply expanded the electorate, but indeed expanded the very notion of democracy itself. In order to understand the current “stop the steal” mobilization, we have to see that for a certain sector of fascists and white supremacists, these changes have always been illegitimate. In their minds, Black people in particular are not and cannot be fit for self-government. They are not democratic citizens. They are necessarily the excluded Other, so their participation threatens white democracy itself.
This is why, Joel Olson argues, we must abolish white democracy. We need to abolish whiteness as a social category that produces hierarchy and racial oppression, and we need to abolish the system of white democracy that defends whiteness and capitalism.
But I do believe in democracy. My vision of it is similar to that old vision of “participatory democracy” that they talked about in the 1960s. Democracy is an active practice in which people make decisions about the things that affect them. It is about self-government, true equality, and true freedom. It is incompatible with the vision of white democracy that these fascists support. It is also incompatible with the settler empire called the United States.
Final Thoughts on Fascism’s Growing Threat
To be clear, I think that the storming of the Capitol is a Very Bad and Scary Thing and that fascism is a large and growing threat that must be taken very seriously. But I do think the danger is probably more in the medium to long term rather than in the short term. This gives us time to prepare so that we won’t continue to be outmaneuvered by them.
Short term: they are not well organized. They clearly had no idea what they were going to do in the event that they actually got into the capitol building. Trump is largely ineffective. Most Republican officials have repudiated them. The majority of the government and the majority of the population clearly found the whole thing awful and I don’t see a real possibility of any kind of actual coup before Biden takes office.
Medium term: the far right gets to claim a major win and this will embolden them. We will very likely see a major escalation in both street violence and lone wolf violence coming from fascists (and as a friend pointed out, likely further actions on inauguration day and future coordinated actions at state Capitols). I would not be surprised if this also functions as the beginning of the consolidation of a more significant mass fascist party/organization/movement. Which brings me to…
Long term: think of this as analogous to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. A couple thousand Nazis led a doomed insurrection, some of them were killed, Hitler ended up in prison for treason. This is when he wrote Mein Kampf. Although the putsch was a total failure, it was a very important moment in the development of the Nazis, and we know what happened ten years later. Is this the most likely direction that history now heads in? Probably not. But this is the danger: that fascists successfully use this experience to help build a militant mass movement.
This is why we must continue to vigorously oppose fascists at every turn. Biden won’t save us. The Democrats won’t save us. The State won’t save us. Only sustained organization and action will.
