Is it Fascism Yet?
Here's the big one: "But it's fascism!" The January 6th event wasn't a demand for Medicare-for-All or any progressive purpose; it was a fascist insurrection to keep Donald Trump and his brand of white supremacy in power.
I would not call it an "insurrection." It had not the slightest possibility for overturning the government--no leadership, political organization, program, or discipline, mass support, or support from any faction of the ruling class or armed element of state or powerful foreign government that would be necessary for such a thing. If there were a few people in it who thought it could, they were delusional. The crowd mostly wandered around for a couple of hours taking selfies (sometimes with cops!), smoking doobies, shoplifting, and vandalizing, and then left. For all the talk of "armed insurrection," the only shot fired was from a cop's gun. For "fascist" and "insurrection," see Ukraine, 2014.
One might generously say that the full demonstration (from 10-30,000 people, accurate numbers hard to get) included many who did believe the populist save-democracy-from-the-cheating-elites framework, and it certainly included a cacophony of factions from Iranians for Trump to Zionists brandishing Israeli flags. But this demonstration was about the electoral process like Godzilla was about nuclear radiation. The ostensible concern for any election cheating was overwhelmingly subordinate to the dominant right-wing goal of keeping Donald Trump in power, which, for many, was because they saw Trump as the hope for some Make America White Again Reconquista. In 2021, parading around under Confederate battle flags really can't mean anything else.
The storming of the Capitol by a particularly militant cohort of about 800-1200 people (according to media estimates, which seem low)--ranging from proto-fascists and "Confederate" white supremacists to cosplay lunatics to neo-yippie potheads--was especially an action that we all should oppose. They were fighting for crap, and I would have been glad to see the Capitol police contain them.
Though not at the cost of 20 more dead protestors. Stopping the embarrassment of the empire that this demonstration was would not be worth that cost. The police should have been able to contain it as they have every other, and we should definitely question why they were unable to do that. Why wasn't there the massive preventive police presence or repressive police reaction that there would have been for a less militant BLM or left demonstration? Why were there so many instances of seeming cooperation with these right-wing rioters, etc.? There are reasonable suspicions about incompetence and collusion that deserve investigation.
So, "fascism"?
I want to resist the way "fascism" has come to mean "absolute evil" in a way that displaces the historical materialist understanding of that socio-political phenomenon. I would say January 6th was a proto-fascist event that demonstrated a simmering threat of fascism, and also demonstrated what is missing and needed for that threat to become critical.
There's a checklist of pernicious characteristics typically used to identify fascism--strict authoritarianism, cancelling of democratic processes and civil rights, worship of a great leader, militarism, scapegoating and ultimately attacking some "inferior" ethnic, racial, national, or religious group. A lot of these are present in American politics, and by no means limited to Trump, the Republicans, or right-wing militias.
Missing in this kind of definition is the understanding of fascism as a dimension of class struggle. The essential task of historical fascism was to defeat the strong working-class socialist and communist movements that threatened the rule of capital, within countries and internationally. All the nasty attitudes and policies were means to that end.
The fascists came--were allowed to come--to power in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) with the support of strong elements of ruling-class finance and media, when, and because, there was a very strong mass, socialist working-class movement that was a threat to the ruling class and had to be brutally crushed, and because there was the international "Bolshevik" threat to European capitalist rule that had to be defeated militarily. Not because Germans were essentially and irredeemably racist and anti-Semitic--a construal that precisely disappears the role of capitalism and class.
The reason there is no imminent threat of fascism in the U.S. is because there is no working-class socialist threat. There is no fascism, in the apocalyptic sense being evoked, independent of the ruling class and its need to prevent socialism, working-class power.
There are always proto-fascist elements simmering in capitalist society that can be called upon if necessary. Indeed, as the historical materialist analysis understands it, capitalism engenders incipient fascism, just as it engenders incipient socialism. They are siblings in the womb of capitalism, the less unwanted of which capital will call upon to eat the other if it starts kicking its way out.
But those elements need to be called upon. Fascism can only come to maturity as an instrument of (and socialism only independent of) the ruling class. Proto-fascism will be fascism when the ruling-class gets behind it, just as "democratic socialism" will be socialism when the working-class gets in front of it.
So while we certainly have some of the pre-conditions for fascism in the United States today, what we don't have, what's completely absent, is a strong, left working-class political movement. In the absence of that, what kind of "fascism" does the ruling class want or need? They already have complete control of the economy, the political parties, and the media--not yet all internet expression, but they're working on it. What more can "fascism" do for them? What "white supremacist" program do they need or want that does any better in keeping black people crushed and coopted than the mix of mass incarceration, integrated militarized policing, and rainbow bourgeois governing they've had going for forty years. Is there a powerful faction of the ruling class that wants or would allow some Turner Diaries-inspired mass extermination of black people? The reinstitution of slavery or Old Jim Crow? What is the "fascist" program that does something the ruling class needs, and isn't doing for itself already?
Because if the ruling class doesn't want it, fascism isn't happening. Only if they become scared enough of a left working-class movement that threatens their control of society will the capitalists turn to the fascists. Until then, "fascism" exists as a frightful lure to get the liberals and the self-mutilated left to go along with various forms of repression that will mostly be used against them. This is the state of preemptive counter-revolution--the state in which the left eats itself in advance, 'Cause Fascism!
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