“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 have a new podcast essay out today titled “Anarchist Anti-Fascism” in the Anarchist Essays podcast from the Anarchism Research Group. It’s based on presentations I recently gave at the American Historical Association and the European Social Science History Conference, and draws on a longer piece from my dissertation.
“In this essay, Spencer Beswick argues that anarchist infrastructure, values, and tactics played a key role in the development of militant antifascism in the late twentieth century United States. He explores how anarchists in Anti-Racist Action (1987-2013) and Love and Rage (1989-1998) confronted fascists in the streets while also organizing radical movements that sought to address the root causes of the broader social crisis.”
Two years after the failed Jan. 6, 2021, coup, the far right continues to escalate threats against marginalized groups and to our democratic system more broadly. The mass killing at Club Q in Colorado Springs, followed soon after by an attack on an electrical grid, which some suspect might have been motivated by a desire to disrupt a drag show in North Carolina, offer a grim foreshadowing of more violence to come. This is particularly worrying given Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) recent statement to the New York Young Republican Club that if she and Stephen K. Bannon had been in charge on Jan. 6, the mob “would have been armed” and “we would have won.”
This movement has many of the elements we recognize as fascism. Fascism is a far-right political approach that offers what the historian Robert Paxton calls “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity” to people obsessed with perceived humiliation and social decline. Historically, fascist movements have taken the form of militant nationalist parties that turn against democracy in alliance with elements of the conservative elite. They engage in “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Although it may seem to have come out of nowhere, today’s American fascism has roots in a surge of far-right violence in the late 20th century. We have much to learn from the recent evolution of fascism — and from anti-fascist responses — to help understand far right violence today. . .
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.
Noel Ignatiev used to say that the biggest impediment to revolution in the United States is that most white workers identify more with their race than with their class. Thus, they side with the white ruling class in order to obtain what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “wages of whiteness” that separate them from workers of color and prevent effective working class unity [ed: a friend reminded me that this phrase was actually from David Roediger riffing off of Du Bois]. How does this play out in practice and how can we break the cycle of white identification?
A friend of mine told me about his recent trip to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which chronicles the miner’s strike and armed uprising that led to the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. As he explored the town, he saw a flyer advertising a support group for addicts. It was a standard pitch, something like: “Do you feel alone and unsupported? Are you dealing with addiction? Are you in debt and struggling to make ends meet? Come to our weekly support group for help to get back on your feet.” The kicker was that at the bottom, it was signed by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Let’s dig into this scenario. Imagine a poor white opiate addict, a young person working a minimum wage job without a clear future. The relatively good jobs that had given their parents and grandparents a higher standard of living have disappeared. They feel that they have nowhere to turn for support, for community, for hope of a better life. What comes next?
1. They could see this flyer for the KKK-run addiction group. They go to a meeting where they find a supportive community that tells them that they are not alone and they are not broken. The group make them believe that there is the possibility to be strong and whole with hope for a better future. The problem is that immigrants, Black people, and globalist (Jewish) elites have stolen their job and their dignity. Rather than identify with a multiracial working class, their problems (and their solution) are articulated along racial lines. They are led to identity with their whiteness as the only path towards a better life. This is the base for fascism in the United States.
2. Imagine that this person encounters a different flyer. It has a similar message around addiction support but it is posted instead by a local DSA chapter or anarchist mutual aid network. This group provides support for them on an individual level but they also supply a different analysis of their problems and a very different solution. The blame is not placed on immigrants, Black people, or Jews, but rather on the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses the vast majority of people. The group helps to unionize the worker’s low-wage job, thereby showing the material benefits of struggle and solidarity with all workers (including, we might imagine, an immigrant worker who was previously the target of scorn and abuse by white workers). This process helps the person to identify with their class rather than their race. They see that multi-racial workers’ solidarity actually improves their material conditions, and they are drawn into the anti-racist left.
3. What do the Democrats offer to this person? For better or worse, liberals tell them that they can identify neither with their race nor their class. Dems perhaps offer a tepid job training program and admonish them to abandon the white privilege that they cling to as their last remaining hope. Is it any surprise that the person might reject this option? And that, in the absence of a strong leftwing alternative, they might be pulled in by the fascist, white supremacist path of the KKK? If the left isn’t there offering a model for white workers to identify with and fight for their class interests, then the fascists will certainly do it with race.
After Trump’s election in 2016, people wrote a whole series of postmortems evaluating the role that the white working class played. On the one hand, “economic anxiety” was blamed; on the other, white supremacy and racism. I think that this debate misses the point of how politics actually works. Most people are exploited under capitalism, including the white working class. Most people, again including the white working class, also experience assaults on their sense of dignity and worth. The question is not whether or not individual white people are fundamentally racist, but rather how their grievances are articulated into a coherent set of politics.
The same grievances can be framed in either race-based terms (Trump tells white workers that Mexican immigrants stole their jobs) or class-based terms (Bernie tells white workers that capitalists shipped their jobs overseas). In the first case, immigrants are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in racial terms. In the second case, capitalists are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in class terms. The point is not to convince white people in abstract moral terms that they should give up their white privilege, but rather to offer a political analysis and strategy for improving their lives through identification and struggle within the multi-racial working class.
This analysis is not based on morality but rather on strategy. None of this is a call for people of color to have more sympathy for white people or move to rural areas to organize them. I think white radicals have a specific role to play here. It’s not just about doing what is morally right, but rather preventing fascism from spreading further and offering a revolutionary alternative.
Note that I am not calling for “color-blindness.” Disidentification with whiteness requires an active process of treason and struggle against white supremacy, not a simple disavowal of the privilege of one’s skin color. The point is not for white people to simply check their privilege, but rather for us to develop and popularize modes of analysis and struggle that enable white people to identify common interests with people of color and fight together to overthrow this system and build a new world in its place.
Here is my general read of the current situation with the Democrats trying to pass Biden’s spending bill, framed within a broader conflict between different sectors of capital:
The Republicans and the Democrats represent different sectors of capital, broadly speaking. The Republicans generally represent less dynamic (even dying) sectors whereas the Democrats represent more progressive and dynamic sectors (particularly big tech and “green” industry).
Part of why the Republicans have gotten more reactionary is that they literally represent dying industries and the white labor aristocracy that has benefited from these industries (think coal mining, old manufacturing jobs, etc.). All that the Republicans can do is to try to preserve what they see as the good old days, from the perspective of both their capitalist and working class bases. I think the future for them is either fascist seizure of power (electoral or otherwise) or a major shakeup.
The Democrats, on the other hand, represent more of the future of capitalism. They are concentrated in the most dynamic, forward-looking, innovative sectors. Big tech gets a lot of the focus, but I think the key here is the green energy sector. Green capitalism—which will still depend on the exploitation of people, land, and animals, but in an ostensibly kinder and more sustainable guise—is likely the way that capital will try to save itself both from climate catastrophe and mass movements demanding a livable world. This might require a relatively substantial break with neoliberal orthodoxy.
But not all Democrats are united around this. It seems clear that Joe Manchin represents one of the major dying sectors of capitalism: coal mining. The fight between different sectors of capital is not over within the party, although it could conceivably be over soon.
I think this framework of understanding the Dems and Repubs as representing different sectors of capital helps explain what is going on here. For what it’s worth, I actually think that most Democrats in office truly want to pass the spending bill. This isn’t all just a show with Manchin and Sinema acting as convenient scapegoats (though I imagine that is part of it). Biden’s plan isn’t radical or socialist. It will arguably be good for the reproduction and growth of capitalism—or at least, for the most dynamic sectors of the nascent green capitalism.
There is a real split within the capitalist/ruling class here. The options on offer are two different visions of the future of capitalism—green capitalism vs fascist reaction. I obviously don’t think either are good. But this dissension gives an opening for us to organize and push for a truly transformative vision that will overcome the contradictions of capitalism and present an alternative both to fascist reaction and to the “green capitalism” that is waiting in the wings.
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.
