Fighting Opportunistic Infections: How Socialists View the Struggle Against the Far Right
On December 2, members of the far-right Proud Boys and Patriot Front demonstrated en masse outside the Red Oak Community School in Columbus, Ohio. Attempts by the Columbus Left milieu to oppose this provocation by fascist and semi-fascist elements were signally ineffective and poorly organized. Much of the failure to organize effectively against fascism in Columbus can be traced to myriad and mutually incompatible ideas among liberals, reformist social democrats, anarchists and Marxists about what fascism is, who the fascists are and the relation of fascist aggression to broader social struggles. The recent victory of the Far Right in Columbus prompts us to speak to the question of how the working class and oppressed people can best combat organized fascism.
In order to understand the current American Far Right, we must first understand the various meanings of fascism. We must understand fascism as a family of political ideas and stances, as a fringe political subculture and as a mass movement capable of seizing state power. First, from a purely philosophical or intellectual point of view, we can see fascism as a vulgarization of the European Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. European Romanticism revolted against the ideas of universalism and progress that characterized the European eighteenth century. Against the Enlightenment emphasis on cosmopolitanism and natural law, Romantics celebrated the individuality and specialness of local culture. Thinkers like Johann Gottfried von Herder advocated the social ideal of das Volk, or a society united by organic bonds of loyalty, kinship, language and tradition. Generally speaking, however, Romanticism was not a politically conservative movement; the Romantics themselves were often strongly anticapitalist and anticolonial, and Romanticism strongly influenced the thought of American Abolitionists, Latin American revolutionaries and Black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois.
The reactionary aspects of Romanticism, however, have often found a hospitable audience among the middle classes of capitalist societies. As early as 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the simultaneously “reactionary and Utopian” character of what they called “petty-bourgeois socialism” in the Communist Manifesto. The class of small proprietors and independent “artisans,” according to Marx and Engels, is “constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society.” The middle classes, that is, suffer along with the working class under the constant social upheavals and crises of capitalism. However, they do not imagine a complete overthrow of capital, but the restoration of a more “humane” and “traditional” kind of capitalism.
Petty-bourgeois radicals aspire either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. Petty-bourgeois radicalism, therefore, tends to mix militant demands with nostalgia, sentimentality, anti-intellectualism, provincialism and paranoia. Pushed to the brink, the middle social layers seek change, but on their own culturally conservative terms. Soon after the capture of state power in Germany by the Nazis in 1933, Leon Trotsky wrote, “The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other. Its dissatisfaction, indignation, and despair are diverted by the fascists away from big capital and against the workers. It may be said that fascism is the act of placing the petty bourgeoisie at the disposal of its most bitter enemies. In this way, big capital ruins the middle classes and then, with the help of hired fascist demagogues, incites the despairing petty bourgeoisie against the worker.”
The social layer of small property owners, middle managers, technicians, cops, petty bureaucrats, clergymen and other half-independent, half-enslaved types are—with the assistance of a pigsty of cynical ideologues, today represented by swine like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—thereby made into the a vanguard of fascism. Moreover, it’s easy to see why the conservative aspects of Romanticism—its comforting emphasis on the specialness of one’s own state, nation and religion—would appeal to them.
However, neither fascist ideas nor a fascist movement (no matter how well organized or fanatical) can bring about fascist power by fiat. Historically, fascist capture of political power has depended on certain objective conditions arising within capitalism—namely, a crisis in the legitimacy of the state, usually brought about by economic crises like mass unemployment or runaway inflation. In bad economic times, many people beyond the fascist base may come to distrust liberal democracy and traditional political parties. This distrust and uncertainty provides an opening for “outsiders,” crackpots, and fringe movements. Under such circumstances, fascists and semi-fascists may offer themselves as an alternative to the failing choices of liberal and conservative politics. Responding to the rise of Italian fascism in 1923, the German communist leader Clara Zetkin wrote, “Fascism, with all its forcefulness in the prosecution of its violent deeds, is indeed nothing else but the expression of the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.” Therefore, wherever we see fascism gaining a foothold in the working class, whenever we see fascist ideas circulating freely in mass culture, we should recognize it as the symptom of an opportunistic infection. Fascism thrives on the necrotizing tissue of capitalism.
From this analysis, we can derive a number of conclusions. First, all working-class and oppressed people must stand together against fascism in all its forms; yet, an effective strategy to defeat fascism must employ different tactics at the different levels at which it infects society. For example, we must recognize the specific danger of fascist movements even in their nascent and marginal forms. Fascists engage in violence not only to achieve state power, but also as propaganda for their political ideals. That is, as long as fascism remains a fringe movement, fascist violence against marginalized people serves mainly as a form of theater by which fascists can demonstrate their (still largely imaginary) strength and their commitment to their politics. By such demonstrations, they seek to show their own fitness for state power itself. At this stage, fascism may take the form of “trolling” and pranks, but the goal is to provoke violent confrontation with the defenders of bourgeois democratic norms, with the hope of further discrediting them. Under such circumstances, the fascists may be dangerous, but the solution to their violence is straightforward—massive, organized, disciplined resistance on the part of not only affected communities, but the entire working class. This resistance may—and often must—include planning for armed self-defense. As Zetkin argued, “The proletariat must have a well organized apparatus of self-defense. Whenever Fascism uses violence, it must be met with proletarian violence. I do not mean by this individual terrorist acts, but the violence of the organized revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat.” If we follow Zetkin’s advice, however, we must understand that neither simple brawling (unarmed or armed) nor random vigilantism can effectively meet the threat of incipient fascist violence. It is of course necessary for oppressed people to defend themselves, but it is also crucial that the organized Left deprive the Far Right of any propagandistic victories, of any political legitimacy whatsoever. This means that beyond physical defense, socialists always strive to demonstrate the cowardly, phony, and essentially irrational character of the Far Right. Socialists constantly strive to offer a better, radical, emancipatory alternative to both establishment politics and the false choice of fascism. Socialists avoid a narrow orientation of their practices to the activist milieu and seek to bring an antifascist message to the largest audience possible, drawing the whole of the masses into the struggle. Individual Far Right groups may be temporarily stymied, but fascism as a movement will never be defeated by conspiratorial affinity groups or subcultural cliques.
Above all, revolutionaries must abjure any tactics that resemble those of our fascist enemies. One of the greatest errors of the December 2 Columbus organizers was—deliberately or inadvertently—to foster a culture of unaccountable leadership, undemocratic decision making, and insularity. Much of the confusion, incoherence and clumsiness of that action resulted from trying to enforce the decisions of a small “organic” activist clique on a much broader coalition. This is historically one of the main contradictions of anarchism—that in practice, its rejection of formal democracy leads to a rigid and out-of-touch activist subculture, an “informal” hierarchy based on personal reputation and clout. In her famous essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” feminist Jo Freeman wrote, “As long as the structure of [a] group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few, and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”
Moreover, Freeman writes, “[I]informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away.” This lack of accountability is even worse when organizers see the insular and informal character of their cliques as a virtue and not as an obstacle to effective practice. For example, in the case of the December 2 organizing group, the leaders responded to criticisms with the claim that public criticism violated the action’s “operational security,” and yet these very leaders undemocratically arrogated to themselves the sole authority over what constituted proper operational security. Hence, these organizers assumed authority for the broader action based on their prestige in a narrow activist milieu, and subsequently used that sense of authority to try to suppress public criticism. As the leadership of the Columbus Revolutionary Socialists put it in their statement on the debacle:
“By laying claim (first unofficially and then officially) to the “community defense” organizing around the event, the [organizers] effectively captured all the outrage and indignation at the fascists and funneled it into their operation. Without democratic processes through which the will of the would-be community could express itself, the character of the defense remained merely that of a volunteer mercenary outfit with few prospects for building towards a broader formation or movement (and none now that it has failed so utterly). [ . . . ] In refusing to put out any public facing call for volunteers until they had already thoroughly established control over the event’s organization, and by putting obstacle after obstacle in the path of those looking to stand against the [Proud Boys], they weakened our movement and actually put the lives of everyone involved in more danger by undermining the safety universally present in numbers.”
Crucially, what we saw in Columbus is precisely the kind of gatekeeping that produces doubt and cynicism among working people and leads to a mood of acquiescence to fascism—which in turn isolates the Left milieu even more.
The second—and more important—conclusion we should derive from a Marxist interpretation of fascism is that no narrowly antifascist campaign, no matter how effective, can address the objective tendencies in capitalism that foster the growth of fascist ideas and movements. Any permanent victory over fascism must be a victory over capitalism.This means that while socialists seek to foster the largest possible and most democratic movement against the Far Right, socialists never subordinate or “temporarily” abandon their own revolutionary ideas and public-facing practices. Even when they work in broad coalitions, socialists cannot become mere foot soldiers for bourgeois political parties, liberal NGOs and nonprofits or (especially) self-appointed reformist “community leaders.” Moreover, while in the short term, socialists strive to draw as many people as possible into an antifascist movement, they do so in a way that advances Marxism and socialism in the long term. Just as we cannot defeat fascism without ending capitalism, we cannot turn resistance to fascism into revolutionary struggle without educating the masses about the real nature of fascism. Once again, this means that socialists must work to move from ad hoc antifascist mobilizations “led” by unaccountable activists, to a robust and militant organized mass socialist movement.