For four years, it's been, "You can't stray from the neo-liberal, imperialist consensus, 'Cause Trump! That's now becoming, 'Cause Fascism! i.e., Absolute evil--an ahistorical, apolitical, idealist diversion from historical materialist understanding of fascism within the dynamics of capitalism and class. And a political trope that buttresses the regime and actors that are most responsible for the re-emergence of actual fascism in the world.
By playing this game, the left isn't "getting in front" of fascism; it's getting in front of itself. The only "fascists" the Democratic Party is going to denounce are working-class people and Republicans. Anyone who advocates deplatforming and disenfranchising people on an expansive notion of "fascism" had better start with Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, and their former boss, Barack Obama, who have done more to bring explicit Hitlerian fascism back into governance in the world, via the violent insurrection that overthrew a freely-elected government in Ukraine, than anyone who was in D.C. on January 6th.
Whether you're a Democrat, leftist, socialist, antifa, anarchist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, or Bukharinist, if you're calling for some state-enforced repression against anyone who attended or expressed support for the demonstration in Washington on January 6th, and you're not always and explicitly calling for the same state-enforced repression to be visited first of all against the specific actors above, your "anti-fascism" is in the service of U.S. imperialism, and is only helping to build up the state of pre-emptive counter-revolution.
We are not in a revolutionary situation, we are in a counter-revolutionary situation, and the expression of that is not what happened on January 6th, but what happens every day in those hallowed halls.
January 6th did not happen because there wasn't enough censorship or anti-terrorism law. It happened for a number of reasons: because there are racists, and also because there are a lot of people who are angry about a socio-economic crisis that has devasted their communities, and angry at a political and electoral system, which has been coalescing around the Democratic/NatSec/media establishment, that they do not, and should not, trust.
Denouncing them, and all 75 million people who voted for Trump, as fascists, and calling for more censorship and anti-terrorism repression, will not stop it from happening again. Nor will it do what is necessary to defeat any critical fascist threat that may arise--build a mass working-class movement of the left.
Please register the horrible fact that we do not have a left movement of any political strength, so it's not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the American capitalist state--FBI, the DHS, the Atlantic Council, et. al.--that will be empowered to hunt down and censor "fascists." It's a bit incongruent for leftists to attack the U.S. state for colluding with fascists, and in the same breath call on that state to be the anti-fascist police. It's literally the ruling class--the indispensable enabler of fascism--whose muscles you are helping to flex. Guess who ends up getting punched in the face?
The most important reason to be wary of misrepresenting or inflating the threat of "fascism" is that it prevents the organization of a left movement of the working class, which has been shrinking in the womb of U.S. capitalism for 40 years.
Do you think it might be a little dangerous & even irresponsible implying that 75 million people who voted for Trump are Nazis? That seems to be the new line from right-wing neoliberal media even as they say the people shouldn't worry because Biden will bring people together!
- Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) January 15, 2021
For the U.S. left to build a working-class socialist movement, it must become what it decidedly is not, and hasn't evinced much interest in being--a pole of attraction for millions of people who are not socialists, do not agree with many of the motley commandments that have become the dogma of the "woke" American left, and are still largely held as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (Steinbeck actually said "capitalists") in capitalist ideology. Given the enormous ideological work done by the Fox-MSBNC, Breitbart-NYT media universe, which is the primary source of political education in this country, what else could you expect?
As I've said before, "For socialists, solidarity is not a matter of prior agreement. You don't have to agree with me for me to defend your interests." Want to reduce the number of people ready to storm the Capitol in support of a right-wing grifter? Want to maybe even start gathering enough people to storm the Capitol for good reasons? Which kind of approach works better: "I'm here to tell you you're a fascist, kick you off Facebook, and get fired from your job," or, "I'm here to help you fight for your job, your healthcare, and your pension." Which is the better basis of the only effective "anti-fascist" strategy--building a revolutionary left working-class movement.
Think January 6th was "fascism"? Think impeaching Donald Trump and trying to disenfranchise everyone who voted for him is going to stop something worse from happening? The populist right has already woken up to the fact that Donald Trump is a "shill," "extraordinarily weak," and "a total failure." Wait 'til you see the movement that arises under a smart and competent right-wing leader, strengthened by the inevitable backlash from many of those seventy-five million people, who presents him/herself as a defender of civil liberties, and of the dignity and security of every person against the newly-enhanced authoritarian state of "two political parties that do not care about you, so deeply incestuous with corporations that they're indistinguishable from each other, a government that has bombed villages overseas my entire life for my supposed safety here," and like that:
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