anti-fascism

By Skyler Simmons - Earth First! Journal, April 21, 2017

In this age of Trump, with its’ rising white nationalism and escalating acts of terror against people of color, there can be no ambiguity when it comes to resisting white supremacists in particular and the far Right in general. And the environmental movement is no exception.

Unfortunately environmentalists have long flirted with racist and even outright fascist ideas, from kicking out immigrants to totalitarian population control. It’s time for the environmental movement to come out as an unequivocally antiracist and antifascist movement. We must show that we are ready to defend human dignity and equality with as much commitment as we defend the Earth.

While many of us within the environmental movement have been taking collective liberation seriously for years, from chasing the Klan out of our communities to answering the calls from communities of color to embrace environmental justice, our movement as a whole has done too little to challenge the racist tendencies both within environmentalist circles as well as society at large. It is time we take seriously the threat posed by racism and the Far right, and firmly position antifascist organizing side by side with our efforts to defend Mother Earth.

By African People's Caucus - It's Going Down, April 5, 2017

Fascism is a concept that has grown a lot of particular interest since the election of Donald Trump and the failure of neoliberalism. While we don’t consider Trump himself to be a fascist but a right wing populist, we do recognize that he has mobilized a broad coalition of the right, which includes some fascists. However, reactionary violence is nothing new to black and African people living in the United States. Our communities have seen first-hand the terror campaigns of proto-fascist groups such as the KKK, and other kinds of organized white supremacist violence. Our oppression and exploitation have been central to the establishment of modern capitalism in the Americas. This also means we have been fighting back since we were brought here. Our stake in anti-fascism is not an academic question.

Fascism needs to be defined for our context: right now this is a smaller element participating within a popular front of the right wing. Most notable of this multi-tendency white nationalist milieu is the alt-right, who believe in atrocities such as “white” ethnic cleansing, misogyny, violence against a perceived “other” (minorities, refugees, Muslims, women, lgbtqia, Jews), and overwhelming worship of authority and class-based hierarchies. What allows this to spread is that neoliberal economic policies under capitalism cause the working class to suffer, and they are given scapegoats and offered false and authoritarian solutions. The reactionaries’ influence within the State will be strengthened, which will increase the suffering of black and African people at the hands of the police, prison, and poverty.

While fascism sometimes spreads using political opportunists like the electoral right wing, it is also an independent movement of the insurgent right wing and has an agenda separate from and opposed to the current state. Fascists also recruit through entryism into popular cultures and subcultures (music, arts, internet groups, faith-based, etc). Today’s fascists have improved the ability to hide within “legitimate” conservative political and social groups. Its spread is international and evident in the western turn away from neoliberalism towards economic nationalism, Islamophobic motives surrounding Brexit, and the State literally assassinating drug users in the Philippines. Trump is a big piece of this, but definitely not the only one. In addition to being aware of fascists attempting to turn the repressive state apparatus against us, we also have to prepare to defend ourselves against reactionaries like George Zimmerman and Dylann Roof, who have terrorized us with direct extralegal violence since we got here.

It’s important that we not let our history of struggle be claimed by the liberal narrative that the civil rights era was built on a dogmatic commitment to “nonviolence”. Black and African people have had to physically, mentally, and emotionally defend their communities from State and white supremacist terror, and it was organized. Groups like the Deacons for Defense, Black Liberation Army, and Black Panther Party understood why a self-defense approach in the face of police and reactionaries was necessary. If a person knows the bloodshed that occurred at the height of the labor movement, one must also acknowledge there has been consistent violence against black and African people for centuries.

Labor organizers and specifically the IWW have long-opposed class traitors like the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacists despise the radical left because of their commitment to solidarity with all oppressed people. The IWW will remain a target of the State and the far right, especially as our activity gains momentum and size. The General Defense Committee has been and can continue to be an excellent vehicle to grow the anti-fascist movement.

Anti-fascism needs to grow into an extremely popular movement in order to win. Communities that build their capacity for organized defense against the State and organized hate will be major contributors in the fight against capitalism.

We black and African workers face this threat in many places within and beyond our workplaces, and a fascist threat to any of the working class is a threat to the entire class. We have no choice but to confront organized white supremacists, just as we have no choice but to struggle against the bosses in our workplaces. We are calling on our comrades in the IWW and elsewhere, to join us in confronting white nationalists organizing to direct further violence against our people. We are calling on the General Administration to give our rank and file militants the support we need to organize in defense of ourselves and our class on the ground. We believe that the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” should also be demonstrated by our white comrades who feel as though confronting fascism is optional or of little importance.

For an anti-fascist, revolutionary unionism!

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor interviewed by George Ciccariello-Maher - ROAR Mag, December 2016

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written the most important book of 2016. Published by Haymarket, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation has struck a chord nationwide, garnering major awards but more importantly sparking necessary debates. Like all militant texts, it walks the fine line between Marx’s “ruthless critique of everything existing” — in this case, not only the white supremacist power structure, but also the abject failure of Black elites and the Obama “illusion” — and the revolutionary optimism coalescing in the streets from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond. By showing us how we got here, to a society in which “colorblind” rhetoric provides cover for not only racist continuity but also the dispossession of the poor as a whole, Taylor’s book is a compass for charting a different course altogether. George Ciccariello-Maher interviews her for ROAR Magazine.

By x356039 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, December 14, 2016

The Establishment is at war with itself. On one side you have two national security agencies, the CIA and NSA, who are claiming the Russian government used hackers to rig the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor. On the other you have the FBI who, ten days before the election, put their thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor. Tying them all together are claims FBI Director James Comey was in contact with Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, who has recently withdrawn from consideration for a Cabinet position, and NSA leaks alleging the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian government well before Election Day but that’s not all. The cherry on this fascist sundae is Senator Mitch McConnell’s von Papen-esque decision to halt any sort of bipartisan Congressional statement on the matter. His wife has since been nominated as Secretary of Transportation, a move that is most surely just a coincidence as is naming of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who recently lost half a trillion dollars in potential oil drilling rights to anti-Russian sanctions, as Secretary of State. All around this chaos and corruption the pattern of racist, classist vote suppression operations and electoral fraud is coming into sharp, clear focus.

There’s been a mixed response to this news from radicals of all stripes. Many, quite understandably, are wary of all the agencies involved feeling none of these actors are credible or trustworthy. Others are busy processing the sudden lurch of political conditions from House of Cards to Game of Thrones. None of what is being said by the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA needs to be true for it to be clear as glass they are slugging it out. Never before in American history have agencies of the national security establishment so openly gone to war over any presidential election. By the standards of American history this is a constitutional crisis in a state already suffering from a serious crisis of legitimacy.

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director - Global Justice Ecology Project, November 9, 2016

Dear GJEP Friends and Family,

While surprised by the turn of the election last night, I was not shocked.  Horrified, but not shocked.

The pundits had all but declared Hillary the winner in the days leading up to the election, but a lot of people who have been crushed by the system over the years stood up to be counted. They fell for the hateful, booming rhetoric of a billionaire businessman and TV star with no political experience-because he promised to stand up for them. He promised “change.”

According to exit polls by CNN, however, more than half of people polled are worried about what will happen in the coming years under a Trump Presidency. Over a third are more than worried, they are scared. The atmosphere is thick with sadness, rage, disbelief, fear.

After the filth of this election campaign, many will want to circle the wagons. To wait for the worst to blow over.

But that is not an option. And the fact is, no matter who won the election, we were on a collective course toward the edge of a cliff. Under Obama-the supposed face of progressive “change”-there has been no real action to address climate change. Activists at Standing Rock are being brutalized by the police for trying to stop a pipeline and protect their sacred water and land. Unarmed black people are being killed by police. Drones are dropping bombs on children in far away lands.

The system is broken, no matter who is at the helm.

Donald Trump and the new Republican held Congress will be nasty. There is no question about that.

But the one possible positive outcome of this spectacular disaster is that there is no such thing as complacency any more. You either organize or you let Trump’s agenda of hate run rampant. There have been galvanizing moments in United States history when injustice was so potent, so undeniable that people came out in droves to be part of the force for change. I believe this can become one of those moments.

There is no political party that will do this for us. It is up to us. It is time to acknowledge that the system doesn’t work and start talking about what we do next. Time to mobilize. Time to take action for real systemic change.

That is our commitment here at Global Justice Ecology Project.  GJEP was founded to address the intertwined root causes of social injustice, economic domination and ecological destruction.  That is our mission. And we will keep organizing and building to strengthen the global movement toward the fundamental, transformational, bottom up change necessary to achieve a sane future on this planet.

I hope you will join us.

Onward!

By Antifascist Front - Antifascist News, March 4, 2016

Authors' Note: Before we get started, we want to unequivacably say that we do not think that AdBusters is a fascist or fascist allied publication.  We enjoy a great deal of what they publish, support their project, and will continue to re-post articles, videos, and art from them.  Instead, AdBusters is just an example where the left creates open points that fascists can infiltrate.

The conventional political spectrum often betrays the actual process for radicalization that takes places on what we call the “far-right.”  The term far-right is often negated by comparative fascist studies scholars because it lacks clear boundaries.  Is it right populism?  Was Hitler on the far-right, or Ron Paul?  What we generally mean is anything that is within the fascism spectrum, from racialist to masculanist to other forms of militant right-wing politics.  The defining feature of fascism is that it adopts many aspects of the left, while maintaining the values of the far-right.  This means it may critique capitalism, argue for protection of the environment, and be anti-war, yet do it for reasons that are racialized, based on hierarchy, and opposed to democracy and equality.  It is because of this that they have found easy entry points into the left, often using a lack of ideological coherence or the willingness to be open to conflicting views if they share some political affinity.

Fascist infiltration in left spaces is reported reasonably often, from participation in Palestinian support work inspired by their anti-Semitism to points when the American Freedom Party or National Socialist Movement will join actions against the TPP.  When we get to vaguer left spaces, where analysis is growing and reshaping, this can be the perfect place to slide in and create doubt and complicate the analysis.

AdBusters has been a left institution for a couple of decades now.  Coming out of the “Culture Jamming” period of the 1990s, it was really founded on anti-globalization principles that were critical of global capitalism because of the way it destroys human interactions, replaces consciousness with vapid branding, and generally destroys the earth, communities, and free thinking through compulsive consumerism.  This type of analysis has become less and less popular since the 2008 financial crisis, largely because it is a critique of the excesses of capitalism.  Today, many people would love to have access to that kind of suburban wasteland, but as poverty and the inability to join the working middle class grows, the focus on capitalism’s effects at creating “boredom” and general affluence is less central.  That being said, they have continued to be an incredibly relevant publication, and they were the rhetorical beginning of Occupy Wallstreet, even if they did not do any real organizing work.

While they are often criticized for using the same flashy style as the media organizations they critique, they have used a beautiful design model to subvert conventional communication.  They also attempt to go beyond the analysis of the left at many points and forgo conventional political essays in favor of appeals that are often more emotional, narrative, and experimental.

Within this model, a clear political line is lacking, and they likely support having a diversity of voices.  Inside of that model, however, there has been a lacking of discernment for how some voices have become present.  Part of this comes from the willingness to include voices that would be controversial, even on the radical left, and part of it comes from a lack of understanding among the editors of what fascist crossover politics actually look like.