Trump, Antifa, BLM, Capitalism, etc
Some unedited ramblings that might be an essay one day...
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On 31st May 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted:
“The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organisation.”
The statement is meaningless in real terms. As has been widely remarked, ‘ANTIFA’ (even Trump’s use of all-caps is telling of where he’s getting his ‘information’) is not an organisation at all. It is not a group of people who do things; it is a way of doing a certain thing, namely: opposing fascism. To be specific: it is a strategy of direct action for confronting fascists, fascism, or things deemed liable to incite or encourage the growth of fascism. It is a diffuse, rhizomatic, leaderless cloud of people; connected not by membership or hierarchy but by shared goals and tactics - and even that very broadly. Nor, as has also been widely remarked, does Trump - or indeed ‘The United States of America’ (whatever he might mean by that) - have the ability to ‘designate’ (whatever he might mean by that) anybody or anything ‘a Terrorist Organisation’. (Though Attorney General William Barr subsequently indicated that Trump’s threat - which he has made before - might be implemented in some form.)
The tweet is pure Trump in that it reeks of truculent political illiteracy, barely concealed sadism, paranoid terror, adolescent performative swagger, and a kind of egomania that can fairly be called Hitlerian since Hitler also messianically equated himself and his emotions with his entire nation. What is remarkable, as ever, is how little it matters. Because, as detached from reality as Trump’s statement may be, it nonetheless serves a very real, tangible political function and gives every appearance of being well crafted to be effective and dangerous. And it manages this, as so often with Trump’s addresses, by being aimed far above the heads of the establishment and the professional pundits. It not being aimed at them, their rebuttals also fail to connect with anything or anyone. It is also characteristic of Trump that he manages to be an incredibly skilled politician via the unexpectedly effective tactic of being an irrational ignoramus. Gibberish though it is, the tweet sends a very definite political message out into the ether where anybody and everybody can hear it and react to it as they choose - and of course Trump knows the kinds of people who will choose to react to it in a certain way, even if they only absorb it with, and as nothing more than, a shrug.
The irony is that, by tacitly inciting direct political action against a distinct political tendency, but doing it in such a way that the message can be taken up and acted upon by multifarious and disconnected groups or individuals in such a way as seems right to them, Trump is actually mirroring (albeit in a broken funhouse mirror) the actual structure and tactics of Antifa.
This is not the first time. Indeed, Trump’s own awareness of the fact that his pronouncements from Stupid Mountain are taken as permission and incitement by legions of followers (and Followers) is precisely why he sends tweets like this every time he comes away from Fox News fuming about something and wishing Something was done about it. The ultimate Facebook grandpa, Trump has stumbled bassackwards (via the simple expedient of being staggeringly rich and even more staggeringly stupid, and making a big for attention and his own show on Fox at the historical moment when the ‘long depression’ was so undermining capitalism and the legitimacy and efficiency of neoliberal government that ‘creeping fascism’ began to appear) into the ultimate Facebook grampa dream: he can spend all day watching Fox News, tweet angrily about the stuff he saw that made him angry, and huge numbers of people will a) listen, b) click Like, and c) sometimes go out and Do Something about it. The Something that they do takes many forms, one of them being the ‘stochastic terrorism’ of the resurgent far-right (though I don’t suggest that all of them are Trump loyalists, or that Trump’s twitter witterings are all that motivates them - far from it.) Indeed, these days the actual fascists of the former ‘alt-right’ are generally disillusioned with Trump, he having failed to deliver the Day of the Rope (as they lovingly call the day after they win the race war and proceed to murder all the remaining black people, gay people, left-wingers, etc) a couple of weeks after his inauguration. (If you want to know more about today’s far-right, you could do worse than listen to the podcast I produce and co-host in which my friend and comrade Daniel Harper, who has made himself an expert on the subject, tells me about it in harrowing and hilarious detail.)
The point is that Trump knows full well what he is doing when he tweets things like this, or like “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He is signalling to the troops on the ground - be they cops or national guard or less official groups - in the middle of the protests that they can attack, shoot, beat, maim, arrest, and kill with impunity, as long as the people they do it to are the Enemy. This may not actually be true - I daresay a few officers will find that they do not actually have presidentially-approved blanket impunity from any consequences at all - but it’ll be too late by then. And the rebellion will have been crushed. That’s the plan, anyway. And Trump will enjoy immunity, of course. He will be criticised. He will be repeatedly owned on Twitter by clever liberals. He will be repeatedly excoriated in clever articles. But he will, at the end, suffer no consequences. He never has so far!
Trump may or may not be a fascist depending on your definition (personally I would distinguish between ‘fascist’ and ‘fascistic’) but he is certainly hoping to make this rebellion against the police murder of George Floyd - and everything else it stands for, from the catalogue of police killings of African Americans through to the fact that coronavirus is only the latest curse that hits Black America ten times harder than it hits White America - into his Reichstag Fire moment. He does not of course know anything about the Reichstag Fire (he reportedly kept a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed but almost certainly didn’t get through it) but he knows instinctively that he needs one.
And here we start to hear the siren song of the liberal centrist who warns that by opposing fascism with ‘violence’ and ‘left authoritarianism’ and ‘attacks on free speech for all’, the antifascist actually helps the fascists! “When you think you’re punching nazis you don’t realise you’re also punching your cause,” we’re informed by Trevor Noah, who described Antifa as “vegan ISIS”. He speaks for many. (Though, of course, when we say of Noah and people like him that “he speaks” we actually mean his team of writers.) Far better than barracking them and ‘attacking’ them in the street, far better than shutting them down when they march or organise, far better than protesting when they or their favourite intellectuals are invited to speak on campuses or high-listenership podcasts, we should rather let fascists speak and engage them in reasoned debate, sunlight being the best disinfectant and all that. It might be easy to be seduced by this if one lacked any understanding of what fascism is, or any knowledge of its history. Sadly, lack of understanding of politics or knowledge of history are quintessential traits - one might even say mandatory qualifications - of the species known as the mainstream pundit or opinioneer. Bill Maher claimed victory after inviting Milo Yiannopolous on his show and flattering him in front of millions of viewers, whereas it was actually activists unearthing not-terribly well-hidden dirt on Milo that ended his ascent to respectability in polite reactionary society, and the slow and grinding work of years by antifascists - protesting, haranguing, barracking him everywhere he went - that eventually wore him down to the point where he now scrapes a living working for Alex Jones.
The real problem with Antifa as far as respectable, sensible, mainstream lefties and liberals and centrists are concerned is not that they oppose fascism in the wrong way, but that they actively oppose it at all. I don’t mean that such people are secretly pro-fascist. They’re not, though they are objectively pro lots of things that are far from inimical to fascism, being supporters of a system with more in common with fascism than it has against it. No, I mean that they are anti-fascist but only because it is a threat to them and the system they represent and benefit from. In the 30s, Orwell warned the left that “you have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed Liberal who wants foreign Fascism destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends peacefully – the type of humbug who passes resolutions “against Fascism and Communism”, i.e. against rats and rat-poison.” Depressingly little has changed.
The values such people claim to hold dear are expressions of their class position and interests, hence the ease with which they compromise or jettison them routinely when that same system (and their class interests) require it. Moreover, they oppose Antifa for pretty much exactly the same reason they oppose fascism: it represents politics being grabbed by grubby hands, usurped from the hegemony of its proper stewards in the professional political and media classes, i.e. them. This is why, to them, fascism and socialism look like cousin varieties of the same problem, namely: the wrong people, out and about, making nuisances of themselves, interfering in matters that are outside their proper province. This sort of arrogance provides the rational kernel out of which the right - from the GOP across to the outright Nazis - spins their resentment of ‘elites’.
There was much talk after Trump’s election of a revenge by the ‘left behind of neoliberalism’. This proved to be false. In actual fact, Trump’s base is not to be found among the ravaged working classes or unemployed, the ‘left behind’ of neoliberalism, but among the US’s extensive, relatively prosperous, but squeezed middle layer. The average Trump voter is white and college-educated, fairly well-off but subject to all sorts of pressures. Trumpism fails to map directly onto classical fascism in all sorts of ways, but in this it corresponds quite closely, albeit with inevitable distinctions. Trumpism is powered, to a great extent, by ‘economic anxiety’, but it is not, by and large, the ‘economic anxiety’ of the worker or the poor, but rather of the petty bourgeoisie who survived ‘08 scathed and never fully crawled out from under it, the prosperous white collar guy who sees his mortgage and insurance and energy bills getting steeper and his savings worth less, and the great layer of functionaries who serve the state in the capacity of enforcers, i.e. the police. Trumpism, like classical fascism (albeit with inevitable differences that some try to use as gotchas to disprove the validity of any comparisons to fascism), is based in the “human dust” of the middle classes, as Trotsky called them. Neither of the working class nor of the ruling class, separated from the great mass of workers by relative prosperity and prestige but far below the ever-more-distant pinnacle of wealth, and frequently fucked-over by establishment politicians, even as their vote is endlessly courted with rhetoric about values. Despite all the claims to break with the discredited politics of the past, Trumpism just pulled over another version of the old ‘values’ trick, disguising itself by going brazenly for the kind of openly racist talk that the establishment abandoned (at least in public) decades ago. All those guys with ‘Blue Lives Matter’ stickers and Punisher decals on their cars were captivated by Trump’s Mexican rapists, the Caravan, and the “not people… animals” of MS-13, just as others before them have been captivated by welfare queens and superpredators and godless teachers preaching the heresy of evolution and contraception.
This is happening in the context of a larger-scale process that has been called ‘creeping fascism’. Contrary to myth, neoliberal capitalism has never been about ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’ in areas other than welfare spending or infrastructure investment. It has always been punitive, carceral and imperialistic. You need the militarised police and the prisons (often privatised) to cope with the social problems that explode once you withdraw social spending. Neoliberalism has always been evolving more and more authoritarian methods of government, including sinister methods of monitoring the movements - physical and virtual - of individuals. But recently, neoliberal ‘democracies’ have been embracing fascistic forms of politics and leadership. For all the continuity that exists between the new form and the old (and Trump is far more like Obama and Clinton than he is different) this is definitely a rupture, not only quantitative but qualitative. Trump is not only worse than what has gone before; he is essentially different. He may or may not be ‘a fascist’ but he and the politics he represents are, almost without doubt, ‘fascistic’. (Categories are excellent servants and terrible masters.) This is a qualitative change that may be partly a result of the slow quantitative build-up of state authoritarianism, and is definitely related to the cultural changes that neoliberalism has wrought on societies where it reigns, whether deliberately in its capacity as a deliberate counter-revolution or blindly via the way it has eroded social bonds and the economic security of millions.
At the same time, the corporate media is more hegemonic than ever and is spawning more and more demagogic right-wingers with recognisably fascistic rhetoric who are suffered to dwell within the ‘mainstream’, albeit mostly at the edges. This has been happening for a while now, but seems to flowering now, especially in the person of Tucker Carlso. Carlson is admired by far-right types for a good reason; much of what he says is straightforwardly fascistic - in both content and style - to anyone who knows the ideological markers and ticks of fascism. Fox News may be the rightmost edge of the ‘mainstream’ but it is mainstream, despite its attempts to position itself as a brave outlier up against a left-wing media establishment. Carlson’s quantum leap from standard right-Republicanism to outright fascistic rhetoric is probably a spearhead rather than an endpoint. This sort of ideological drift always has an open field on the right. Fox tends to be pulled rightward by its most successful rightmost voices. Fox has had a rightward-pulling effect on the rest of the US ‘mainstream’ media. And Fox, in the person of Carlson, is trying to outbid a burgeoning right-wing media ecosystem which now includes a groundswell of fascist and fascistic media coming from below via free platforms like YouTube, which is a cesspool of fascistic opinions. So we’re seeing the ideological production system of today’s crisis-ridden neoliberalism being pushed in a fascistic direction by the rising propaganda of an embryonic fascistic mass-movement.
This is not the place to go into this in detail, but it is worth noting that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to speed up the process. Not only have many governments already introduced authoritarian measures for dealing with it (with even the arguably necessary ones worrying in the irresponsible hands of our current rulers), but it has sparked arguably the most catastrophic economic crash in the history of capitalism. The Great Recession of 2008 began an era of slump which Marxist economist Michael Roberts has dubbed the ‘Long Depression’. ‘Creeping fascism’ must be seen in the context of this ‘long depression’. The economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic is orders of magnitude worse than the crash of ‘08 and, in the absence of radical government policies which seem unlikely to materialise, is likely to lead to an even worse and more sustained ‘long depression’. All the political crises ultimately spawned by the ‘long depression’ since ‘08 - crises of legitimacy and deadlock for democratic governments, ‘creeping fascism’, the rise of the radical right, the carnival of reaction that is Brexit, the ascendancy of Trump, the rise of other such fascistic (as distinct from just authoritarian or right-wing) leaders like Modi and Bolsonaro, the ‘post-truth’ phenomenon - are likely to continue, and to be intensified globally, by the post-corona slump into which we’re headed. In tandem with the onrushing climate catastrophe, the corona slump is only likely to accelerate both the rise of fascist movements and the authoritarian, quasi-fascistic drift of the mainstream and the establishment.
This is something of a paradox, since the majority of people in the countries where these tendencies are most pronounced disapprove of racism and discrimination based on identity, at least formally, more than ever before. Yet America and Britain are now both led by people who have openly expressed bigoted views which would generally make them pariahs in other contexts. While majorities formally disapprove of racial, religious and sexual discrimination, the underlying structure of capitalist society is as interwoven with racial and sexual hierarchies as ever, and capitalism in America and Britain still depends on imperialism, which is deeply racialised. As a result of complex historical processes of struggle and reaction, we have reached a pass where anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles have succeeded in changing public opinion to a great degree. However, the underlying economic system remains capitalist, so the structures which give rise to racism and sexism remain in place. As a result, we have widespread public adoption of anti-racist, anti-sexist attitudes overlaid on top of profound lack of understanding of the actual historical, political, and economic content of racism as a phenomenon. Millions have come to see racism as ‘bad’ but not to understand that it is a complex, widespread, subtle, and resilient social system which shapes almost every aspect of life in our society. Liberal capitalist democracies have generally adopted anti-racist ideas since they form part of the complex of liberal ideology which perpetuates the capitalist system, enforcing norms and values compatible with capitalism, while remaining acceptable to vast numbers of people whose mental landscape has been shaped by increased access to education and the legacies of the struggles of the past. The system has had to partially assimilate and appropriate such consciousness in order to neutralise. Capitalism has repeatedly shown itself extremely able to do such things. A best-seller at the moment is Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility. (Lots of white people seem to be flocking to Amazon to find books to help them understand what all the black people are so upset about.) The book contains acknowledgements of structural racial inequality and oppression, of racism as a hegemonic social system linked to exploitation, and of race itself a social construct arising from the needs of capitalism. But the ultimate aim of the book seems to be to produce smoothly operating workplaces, in which white people have absorbed such incendiary truths and learned to cope with them. After all, the book was written by someone whose job it is to help corporations avoid legal trouble by covering their asses with compulsory work seminars about racial awareness.
One of the unexpected byproducts of liberal capitalist democracies adopting anti-racism as official ideology (in performance though nowhere else) is the avenue thus opened for fascists to criticise mainstream politics and the establishment as ‘leftist’. Peter Hitchens, seemingly in a panic induced by the recent Black Lives Matter protests spreading to the UK, recently declared on his Daily Mail blog that “the Left now controls every lever of power” in Britain. Hitchens has recently been engaging in conspiracy theorising about coronavirus being a mere pretext for an authoritarian takeover. He is engaging in the classic reactionary tactic of demonising the left, using the classic fascist tactic - described by Eco in his ‘Ur-Fascism’ - of making the enemy both contemptibly weak and terrifyingly strong all at once. For people like Hitchens, the left are ridiculous and deluded, yet they rule the world. It’s easy to come up with nonsense like this if your definition of ‘the left’ is so broad, including so much liberalism and weak social democracy, so much woke corporate PR speak and HR seminars run by sociologists of racism, and therefore so meaningless, that you can straightfacedly compare Keir Starmer to Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Bolshevik Cheka.
This all this makes it urgent to begin (yesterday) to forge a popular and broad anti-fascist politics, a United Front which nevertheless refuses to compromise with those who want to give fascism an easy ride. It ought to be easy, given how unpopular fascism is. They’re basically the bad guys in every Hollywood movie now, at least in aesthetic form… causing Walter Benjamin’s corpse to explode from concentrated irony. Nevertheless, antifascism seems - incredibly - to have an image problem! It is not only now more important than it has been since the Second World War, and its enemies are widely anathematised, yet it struggles to escape widespread public stigma and disapproval!
Just as everyone is in favour of ‘legitimate protest’ (though definitions are thin on the ground and, in practice, very little protest seems to actually be legitimate), so nobody is pro-fascism. At least, nobody admits to it (often not even the fascists). People like sharing that fake Churchill quote about how “the fascists of tomorrow will declare themselves anti-fascists”, seemingly not noticing that it cuts both ways. Whoever actually did say that was kind of right, in that so many of today’s fascists would declare themselves non-fascists and anti-fascists, absolutely opposed to fascism, frequently slandered with comparisons to fascists by the left who - in their desire to silence those who bravely speak the un-PC untruths the world needs to hear - are themselves the real fascists. In fascists, this sort of reasoning is often simply conscious dishonesty, or a kind of self-justified triangulation in the name of higher truths and aims. But the basic thinking isn’t confined to fascists… which is why they use it: it resonates. And, as with racism considered by so many white people, the thinking seems to run thus: Fascism is bad; I’m a good person; ergo I can’t be a fascist. Job done. The fascism that ‘everyone’ is against is the notional, nebulous, contentless, ahistorical, depoliticised, aesthetic fascism which is just mean people who want to tell you what to do. It’s the fascism of Darth Vader and Voldemort.
This is an instructive rabbit hole, actually, since it provides a fascinating window into the liberal centrist imaginarium. J. K. Rowling sincerely conceives of her work as being about the virtues of tolerance and the horrors of bigotry. She crafted Voldemort, the big villain of the culturally hegemonic Harry Potter series, as a magic nazi, as a metaphor for racial prejudice. Yet she herself has recently outed herself as a raging transphobe, confirming the long-held suspicions of many with a series of vile tweets followed by an even more vile essay laden with misconceptions, prejudices, disingenuous arguments, and bullshit factoids. The entire ‘wizarding world’, when examined closely, is a liberal centrist utopia which, tellingly, is actually a dystopia of class privilege, inborn superiority, and suffocating bourgeois values, in which various magical ‘races’ (all constructed of ethnic stereotypes) serve the wizards, and any political dissent is either mocked or automatically descends into evil. It is no surprise that, all her rhetoric aside, Rowling should reveal herself as a bigot when it comes to trans people. Nor is it any surprise that she should do everything in her power to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, promoting the antisemitism smear (outrageous cheek given the way she described her goblins), and declaring herself against “fascism of the right or left”.
In practice, the ‘tolerance’ of the centre turns out to look like this, time and again. This kind of thinking is terrifyingly widespread, not least precisely because it is relentlessly promoted by the capitalist culture industries. We have reached a point where so many people are so politically uneducated and disoriented, as a result of decades of neoliberal cultural counter-revolution (against the high-points of political knowledge, theorising and struggle in the West in the 1960s), that we find people tweeting things about how nice it would be if we could all - communists, fascists, Jews - just agree to tolerate each other and march together with our banners - hammer and sickle, swastika, Star of David - side by side, and all respect each others points of view and right to speak. This looks like tolerance - at least if you don’t actually look at it or think about it. It’s actually a betrayal of the people the fascists want to destroy, a de facto refusal to tolerate them because they commit the unpardonable sin of causing strife through their lack of enthusiasm for being killed. It is also, in practice, an invitation to fascism to rise and keep rising. This is, objectively, a kind of alliance with fascism. History shows us that it is an alliance which happens again and again where fascism rises. It doesn’t get less serious or less enabling. It gets more so. It has been a vital part of fascism’s ascendancy, where it did ascend. This is where equating fascism with all dissent gets you. This is where equating tolerance with goodness gets you.
Karl Popper famously adumbrated the ‘paradox of tolerance’, pointing out that tolerating intolerance can lead to the disappearance of tolerance. The liberal or libertarian defence of Popper against those who press him into service to defend laws against hate speech is correct, insofar as Popper said that intolerance of intolerance should be a last resort. Popper was also anti-left and counted the far-left along with the far-right as enemies of ‘the open society’. From a radical left perspective, laws against hate speech (and such like) look less like the realisation of the left’s agenda (whatever people like Peter Hitchens, and those like him who fantasize an authoritarian left, might think) and more like ineffective half measures, the capitalist state trying to impose calm for its own reasons, an attempt to smother the morbid symptoms generated by the system’s own inherent contradictions and oppressions, the hypocrisy of what we might call ‘actually existing liberalism’, at best a band-aid on a massive wound that can actually only be healed by mass action from below and system change. It looks like corporate America hiring sociologists of racism to host compulsory work seminars teaching white employees to be less sensitive when told they’re racists, while the very structure of capitalism generates and perpetuates racism.
Capitalist societies generate, rely on, shore up and, in practice, tolerate structures of oppression that run along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. They are baked into capitalism and foundational to its functioning. Capitalism, for instance, needs imperialism to expand, and modern racism began as the ideology of imperialism and colonialism. Locke, one of the founders of liberalism, concerned himself with fashioning philosophical justifications for the appropriation of other people’s countries, and chattel slavery. He is far from unique among the great foundational, liberal philosophers in this. Concerned as they were, whether they knew it or not, to create the ideology that would grease the wheels of a burgeoning new capitalist society, they counted among their triumphs the invention and codification of ‘scientific racism’. The hegemonic ideologies of present day capitalism can be traced back to these foundations. For instance, the intellectual logic for the birth of neoliberalism was provided by, above all others, Hayek, whose explicitly anti-socialist classical liberalism was a direct descendant of the liberalism of the past. Augmented with ideas from the Nazi jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, Hayek went on to help birth Thatcherism and Pinochet’s Chile.
Yet neoliberal capitalism sells itself with an ideology of inclusiveness, equality, and liberation. It presents itself as post-ideological (itself an ideological claim). Similarly, it claims to be post-racism, post-sexism, etc, while continuing to generate and depend on racism and sexism. It being a priori ‘known’ that society is not racist, those who protest about racism must be in the grip of some ideology. Society is not ideological (another a priori given) and thus there is some active element at work distorting the perceptions of the people protesting. Neoliberal ideology frames ideology as, inherently, an evil distortion. Once the battle of the ideological left stops being just clashes with the police (inherently non-ideological, as representatives of society) to clashes with fascists, what we are seeing is two different flavours of evil, distorting ideology, an aberration amidst the a priori non-racist, non-ideological society that looks on. That’s the thinking.
As seen, neoliberal ideology is flexible and can morph to include a partial admission of fault, of work still to be done. Here, racism for instance still exists as an annoying and pernicious side problem, caused by a few recalcitrant and backward oddballs. Neoliberal ideology can even morph in the hands of the left-liberal or social democrat so that it can acknowledge the continued existence of racism as a structural problem, but one that we can address without ending capitalism. What it can’t encompass is the demand to end capitalism as the generator of structures of oppression. Nor can it ever encompass a challenge to its legitimacy and monopoly on legitimate use of power from below.
This is why the mainstream has such an issue with Antifa and active, ‘violent’ antifascism generally. It is not that the people who are prepared to cheerlead for, or tolerate, or try to gradually phase out the manifold horrors of capitalism - poverty, inequality, imperialist war, environmental devastation - are so moral that the sight of violence offends their moist eyes and pristine consciences. The problem is that they are seeing the legitimacy of the monopoly on violence - and more broadly on activity, on power - by the establishment, the capitalist state, challenged from below by ordinary people. That the people in question tend to come from somewhere on the radical left - from revolutionary socialists and communists and wobblies to anarchists and syndicalists - is both to be expected (because the left generally understand fascism and the threat it poses better) and also a further reason for the mainstream to hate and fear them when they see them. Of course, to such people, it looks like “fascism of the left or right” because, to them, their perception buttressed and promulgated by a hundred movies and books and newspaper articles, fascism reduces down to a contextless and depoliticised and ahistorical sort of organised ‘intolerance’; it is the enemy of liberalism and liberalism is the only hope for democracy and fairness; and it rises from below as a sort of excrescence of the ill-educated, its fundamental cause to be found in unchallenged irrationality. Of course it seems to these people like the proper way to deal with it is to endlessly debate it - platforming it all the while - so that it can be disproved and discredited. That way, it goes away because, far from being an emanation of the capitalist system in crisis and deadlock, it is a sort of atavism of the idiotic, people who just need liberal democracy to set them straight. When they see the left, organised and armed, out there fighting the fascists, they see another problem, something in the way of the debate, a barrier between them and both the ideological triumph of liberalism and the monopolistic legitimacy of the liberal state. They see a mass of the great unwashed, brawling, shouting equally threatening slogans at each other. They see politics drained of all content. They see pure form. Ugly form. And they want it cleaned up. And, of course, when they issue the inevitable conclusions from these thought processes for the umpteenth time, and get slapped down by antifascists who’ve heard it all before and know it amounts to fiddling while Rome burns, endlessly reciting that Martin Niemoller poem (with the sympathetic reference to communists decorously censored) while the nazis take your neighbour away, they’re infuriated at being told that they’re not helping, and they interpret the criticism from one tribe of people in black as authoritarianism, a threat to their free speech - this being, of course, the ultimate concern of the middle class writer or intellectual, after they’ve consumed endless reassurances that the main problem with political tyranny is how it impacts on the editorial freedom of middle class writers and intellectuals.
The myth that antifascists want to limit or even destroy ‘freedom of speech’ has been successfully disseminated to the point where it is widely accepted as an obvious truism. It is, of course, all of a piece with the idea that the campus left, indeed the left generally, are oversensitive and dogmatic snowflakes who not only want to set up safe spaces where they never have to hear opinions they disagree with but also want to shut down anyone else who wants to discuss such ideas. Liberals and centrists, inherently closer to the ideology of the status quo, equally inherently suspicious of the ideas of the left, did not actually need much convincing of this sort of thing. Nevertheless, they have been reinforced in such opinions by the propaganda of the right, from the mainstream (which is deeply right-wing in real terms) across to the far-right, whether open or slightly cloaked as in the case of Fox News. The idea of the left, and perhaps particularly antifascists, as anti-free speech has entered the mainstream discourse. This would be a problem all by itself, but it is now becoming a vital lubricant of the ideological justification of the suppression of workers' revolt. And it’s important to remember that variations on this same process have happened before. Indeed, they are a near constant of any time or place where fascism is on the rise. Hitler made great play with his imprisonment, speech bans, and supposed persecution (never mind that the Social Democratic authorities of the Weimar Republic went easy on him for attempting a coup, and tended to repress the left far more than the right).
Fascism’s rise is an effect of the deep crisis of capitalism, including the crisis of the legitimacy and efficiency of bourgeois democratic government. Also an effect of the crisis is the rise of left ideas and workers’ revolt, though this was far more marked in the early 20th century than anything we’ve seen recently, uptick notwithstanding. Antifascism is a vital part of this revolt, conditioned by the rise of fascism. Fascism rises also as a counter-revolutionary movement against the left and class struggle from below. The complex dialectical web of mutually-conditioning causes and effects leads to a recognisable cycle whereby the crisis and its effects on different classes gives birth to a revolutionary (or proto-revolutionary) response and a reactionary response, with the reaction being a reaction to both the crisis and the revolutionary response to the crisis, and the revolutionary response being conditioned by the necessity to combat the reactionary response. This cycle we are witnessing now, at an embryonic stage, in Western ‘democratic’ societies.
These societies are afflicted with the crisis of capital accumulation that has been called the ‘long depression’ (i.e. the inability of exhausted neoliberalism to raise and sustain profit rates, its essential mission), exacerbated recently by the catastrophic recession triggered by coronavirus. This compound crisis has triggered an explosion of responses to the exacerbated internal contradictions of capitalism, i.e. the social tensions caused by the need to keep a racially stratified working class both as exploited as possible and as socially stable as possible, leading to extreme, racially-riven carceral and authoritarian ‘law and order’ systems. The proto-revolutionary responses to this contradiction have just slipped out of a slow-motion gathering of pace into an acceleration of struggle from below. We may actually be in the midst of a classic dialectical tipping point.
The peculiar situation we find ourselves in sees fascism rising in two distinct modes. Firstly, in the more traditional way: i.e. a movement assembling itself from the “human dust” of the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie and state functionaries. This has been happening for a while now, hence the arrival a few years ago of the neo-fascist trends which were lumped together as the ‘alt-right’, many of them actually stemming from older neo-fascist trends that never stopped bubbling away. (The need to redraw the boundaries and specifics of what is the ‘middle class’ to account for changed conditions does not damage the value of the insight; indeed, its continued applicability despite such social evolution is powerful confirmation of its value.) Secondly, in a more novel way, i.e. a kind of ‘fascization’ of neoliberal capitalist states. The most noticeable iterations of this trend being, of course, Trump and Trumpism, Modi in Italy, Bolsonaro in Brazil, the ‘carnival of reaction’ that is Brexit, and the subsequent victory in the UK of Boris Johnson.
Arguably we can see roots of this trend even further back with, say, Berlusconi. It would be wrong to see any of this is evidence of some recent and profound rupture with a better previous ‘normal’. Much of what we see is ‘business as usual’ for mainstream capitalist politics. But this presents us with dual pitfalls: either we fall into the mistake of emphasizing rupture or the equally bad mistake of emphasizing continuity. Emphasize rupture at the expense of continuity and we lose sight of the fact that our fundamental problem is capitalism, and the racist imperialism is entails, even when cloaked in liberal and democratic platitudes. Emphasize continuity at the expense of rupture and we lose sight of the urgent truth that we are entering a moment of profound political crisis and danger, in which fascism (albeit a new form of fascism) is ascendant. Rather than either all continuity or all rupture, we’re witnessing the growing of the new within the old, as a distinct form of the old. The language of dialectics is useful here. We’re seeing a quantitative build towards a qualitative tipping point. There are signposts along the road, even if it is long, flat and winding. Johnson’s contradictory politics - jingoist yet with a semi-return to old-style Tory ‘One Nation’ rhetoric; ideologically libertarian in some respects yet strongly authoritarian in others; deeply reactionary as the vanguard of the establishment effort to vanquish Corbynism, yet inclined towards a limited revival of populist state spending as a sop to some of the demands Corbynism raised/expressed - is a perfect cameo.
It is this evolution towards a newly concerted combination of populism, chauvinism, authoritarianism and reactionary anti-left repression in the ‘mainstream’ politics of the big capitalist democracies that is seen most clearly at work in both state and media rhetoric about Antifa. Let’s stipulate again: demonising the left is far from new. Demonising protest is far from new. Demonising anarchism and socialism is far from new. Anarchists and communists are tried and trusty bogeys, from 19th century paranoia about anarchists practicing ‘propaganda of the deed’ around every corner to the 20th century witch hunts - both flavours of scaremongering deeply spiced with Russophobia, another resurrected paranoia. (It’s truly remarkable, getting on for thirty years after the fall of ‘communism’, how few mainstream politicians and pundits in the US know that Russia isn’t a communist country anymore… suggesting strongly that Cold War antagonism was, at a fundamental level, far more about cynical opposition to an imperial competitor than it ever was any kind of ideological opposition to communism. It’s also truly remarkable how few of them understand that there are differences between anarchism, socialism, communism, Marxism, etc.)
Demonising Antifa in particular is far from new; it’s been a preoccupation of the Western media (off and on) since the WTO protests in Seattle 1999. But, with an apparently germinating greater willingness on the part of the state to use national security state surveillance and militarised police repression against such movements, the particular emphasis on the supposed dangerous and violent militancy of the left, and the left’s supposed opposition to free speech (and thus pluralist democracy and all those other lovely things capitalism loves to pretend to champion and bring everywhere it goes), it’s far from unreasonable to see us as entering a new phase. As always, we need to distinguish between a new phase and an unprecedented phase, to refuse to fall into the trap of overestimating continuity or rupture. The journey to fascism is a deceptively short and easy one for capitalist democracies, neither fully continuity (otherwise there would be no delineable distinctions between bourgeois democracy, authoritarianism, and fascism - and there are) nor fully rupture (otherwise bourgeois states wouldn’t be able or willing to lever fascist movements into power when they need to). It is rather a dialectical process of certain quantitative traits of capitalist society evolving to qualitative tipping points. It happens in identifiably similar ways at previous junctures, hence our ability to see precedents for the current moment in Reaganism, McCarthyism, etc, as well as in classical fascism.
Reaganism was the US political spearhead of neoliberalism, which was partly a cultural counter-revolution against a world that had drifted too far towards social-democracy for a crisis-ridden capitalist class’s tastes. One of its central aspects - serving entwined purposes both economic and ideological - was a war against the left, against unions, etc. Earlier, McCarthyism was one part of a concerted effort on the part of the US ruling class to counter the influence of the ‘rival system’ in the East and any domestic voices who might promote class struggle or opposition to American imperialism in an expansionist phase. Similarly, in recent years we’ve been seeing reactionary currents come to the fore as a response to the uptick of struggle seen growing in slow-motion in things like the Arab Spring, the huge shift in attitudes towards the Palestinians’ struggle, widespread acceptance of LGBT+ rights, the Occupy movement, Corbynism, the movement behind Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter and Ferguson, etc. The explosion of reaction since 2016 has seen a smaller but still significant growth of oppositional ideas and actions (Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ was met by occupations of airports, for instance), which in turn is triggering a fresh wave of reaction. The slow-motion process has accelerated, and seems to be accelerating exponentially just at the moment.
What we seem to be witnessing now is a convergence of the arguments of the fringe far-right and the rightward-drifting mainstream. The distinguishing feature of fascism has always been its base in a mass movement, albeit a movement arising from the “human dust” of the petty bourgeoisie, middle classes, and state functionaries. The danger in the US has for a while now been the possibility of a ‘joining up’ of the growing ‘fascistic’ currents within the mainstream (which have generally found the existing structures of liberal democracy extremely amenable to their agenda) with the fringe currents of far-right politics ‘on the ground’, leading to the possibility of a synthesis of the Trump or Brexit popular coalitions with fascist elements. The potential bridges were already there, with parties like UKIP in the UK standing ready to act as connective tissue. UKIP, fascistic but positioned within the respectable mainstream (albeit at the outer edge), has been a huge rightward drag factor on British politics, illustrating how acceptable fascistic ideas actually are to mainstream institutions like Parliament and the BBC. In the US, it was conceivable that far-right paramilitary groups with patriotic rhetoric might coalesce to give Trumpism a kind of unofficial army/movement outside the institutions it was busy marching through. Either way, it has been far from impossible to imagine the fascistic wedges into the establishment and the mainstream, Brexit and Trump, from acquiring the quintessential fascist mass movement, or the beginnings of one. Were it to happen, it would be an unexpected reversal of the sequence seen in classical fascism - in which the movement arises and then gets levered into government power by a complicit establishment - but the basic shape of the phenomenon would be recognisable enough.
We may still see such a thing. Indeed, it might even be starting to look more likely than ever. The explosion of resistance we’re seeing in the Black Lives Matter protests and statue-topplings could easily catalyse such a thing. To be clear: this is not an argument for stepping down from protest. Rather the opposite. Step them up. The danger, as is always the case for an insurrectionary movement as history has shown time and time again, is in stopping or stalling. General strikes are defeated when they start looking to make concessions and deals. Communes are crushed when they don’t march on the enemy in advance of an attack and thus allow the enemy to regroup. The German Revolution was crushed by Nazism because it failed (one way or another) to move forward, or at least to proactively form an anti-Nazi united front.
The situation in America could be fairly characterised as protestors vs. ‘police riot’. The police are one of the constituencies from which fascist movements draw recruits. They’re one of those middle layers between workers and capitalists, separated from the workers, not of the capitalists but aligned with capitalist interests and tasked with defending private property and social order necessary for capital accumulation. The police in America now are heavily funded and militarised, saturated in a deeply reactionary and authoritarian worldview illustrated by how many of them proudly display Punisher decals. They look increasingly like a paramilitary organisation. Tasked with outright class war against an insurgent population, they start looking like the Freikorps. The mainstream ‘left’ social-democratic politicians and parliamentarians of the Weimar Republic tasked the Freikorps (right-wing paramilitary groups) with putting down the communists (Weimar enforced ‘law and order’ much more strongly against the left than the right) and it led to the swastika entering German politics on Freikorps banners. The Nazi Stormtroopers were the basis of the growth of the Nazis as a mass movement and they grew from the Freikorps. Is it unreasonable to worry about a fascistic movement, based on an increasingly right-wing and paramilitary police force, combined with Trump’s base and those elements of the far-right who would opportunistically put their political purity aside, arising to bolt itself on a Trumpism already in state power and quite likely to stay there, despite Trump’s poor ratings, owing to the weakness of the Democratic challenger? The coronavirus recession looks to be the worst blockage of capital accumulation in the history of capitalism. Quite a catalysing agent, much as the Great Depression proved to be for the Nazis.
Another aspect to all this is the extent to which the ‘mainstream’ media - for all the myths about it being suffocatingly left-wing - is increasingly amenable to the worldview of the incipient fascism. Of course, in formal terms everyone in the mainstream is shocked and horrified and disapproving of anything that looks like fascism, and yet for years now the softball profiles of neo-nazis have been jostling for space alongside sustained assaults on all the same targets as the Nazis. It is now a widespread media wisdom that the left in general and Corbyn in particular has an ‘antisemitism’ problem, that ‘the trans lobby’ is loud and dogmatic and prone to hounding anyone who dares depart from their orthodoxy, etc. We can put these known truths alongside the conventional wisdom about ‘Antifa’ being violent totalitarian communist/anarchist thugs who want to destroy freedom of speech and stir up trouble. One of the most worrying signs is the way the media as a blob will agree on such truths and yet appear - apparently even to itself - to host diverse opinions, managing this via repeating the same ideas with different emphasis. For instance, the liberal media’s take on Antifa is practically identical to the right-wing media’s take (mainstream or fringe). They’ll just phrase it differently. In the liberal/centrist phrasing, Antifa ‘co-opt legitimate protest’, ‘spoil things for everybody’, etc. Increasingly the mainstream right and left converge on even the same rhetoric. Trump himself has made noises about being on the side of the legitimate protestors (never specified… meanwhile every protestor who actually protests is usually found to be illegitimate in some way), claimed to champion the memory of George Floyd, etc. The police chiefs are doing it too, even as they “restore order”, which in practice means sanctioning police riots against every last protestor on the streets.
And if you really believe this - that Antifa, or antifascists in general, or ‘the left’ as a whole, is planning to stifle dissent and free speech for anyone who disagrees with them, and that to agree with them you have to buy into unhinged and dogmatic ideological claptrap - then of course you’re going to see them as similar to the fascists, of course you’re going to look at clashes between fascists and antifascists and - bereft of context - of course you’re going to see them as one indistinguishable mush of scary weirdos, and of course you’re going to be more inclined to wink at escalating authoritarian state violence against them, especially if you’re also led to believe that the police are always reacting to the violent provocations of the fascist/antifascist morass rather than starting the violence themselves. It’s been revealing to see how easily the media as a whole, expressions of individual shock here and there to one side, has absorbed astonishing police violence against journalists. Ideologically primed, if you are in that ideologically-conditioned headspace, you’re going to interpret even what evidence you do see of police aggression as likely justified by some context just outside your awareness. Deprived of actual context, you’re going to assume the existence of missing context that shores up the version of events that makes sense to you in its absence. Even if it makes you uncomfortable, and even if you don’t like the increasingly open and unhinged executive permission to engage in state sadism coming from the very top, you’re likely to see it as a case of a necessary and justified approach that sometimes ‘goes too far’. But the truth is that huge numbers of people have been steadily and stealthily primed to lust after seeing antifascist protestors violently attacked and suppressed, and those people are far from limited to readers and viewers; you can see the eagerness of many writers and journalists in their gloating and misleading reportage.
The idea of ‘freedom of speech’ is one of the most powerful ideological tools the capitalist hierarchy has in its arsenal. The bourgeois fixation on the facile, nebulous, and poorly understood notion of free speech, and the myths about the attitude of the left/antifascists to it, are key. ‘Free speech absolutism’, such a popular pose, is a romantic, fetishistic notion. There is always something of the juvenile show-off about those who declare themselves ‘free speech absolutists’, or who simply rhapsodize ‘free speech’ as a nebulous good requiring no further examination or justification. As the double standards of a media that loves to piously announce its dedication to free speech and free inquiry have shown us, free speech as an absolute value is a chimera. Nobody actually supports it in practice, and generally it is the centrists and liberals who dishonestly claim to, not the left. This makes it easy for the dishonest to claim they are more pro free speech than the left. And they do.
It’s not just a question of the far-right claiming the right to be heard (in practice, they mean the right to do things like invade people’s towns, spread lies at events on campuses, engage in harassment, violently attack people, etc) while admitting amongst themselves that they don’t really support free speech. It’s also a question of the liberal and centrists in the mainstream - let alone the conservatives - rhetorically prizing free speech as a great virtue of democracy and ‘Western civilisation’ etc, while supporting a system, an establishment, a status quo that champions free speech for some while, in practice, circumscribing it for many and ruthless confiscating it for many more. In practice, those who support the existence of capitalism, even ‘democratic’ capitalism, even ‘liberal’ capitalism, also support the continued existence of the white supremacy, the racist police system, the carceral state, and the vast prison-industrial complex (a “new Jim Crow”, as it has been described), let alone the practical suppression of the free speech of millions through the structural silencing that is poverty, poor education, etc. What free speech is enjoyed by those who die early because of the horrors of the US private health care and health insurance system? We have it better in the UK but our political establishment - whichever party controls it - has been chipping away at the NHS for decades, with its stealth privatisation accelerating all the time. What free speech is enjoyed by people who die early because of NHS underfunding? What free speech is enjoyed by the tens of thousands of people who died needlessly from Covid-19 because of our present government’s lethal combination of callousness, negligence, and libertarian dogma? What free speech is enjoyed by those killed by Western ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and countless other places? What free speech is enjoyed by Palestinians living in Gaza, under the brutal system of Israeli racist apartheid - a regime we in the UK and US support with money, arms, and pious words? Ruth Smeeth, associated with the Israel lobby, who assisted the anti-Corbyn ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear, has just become CEO of Index on Censorship. Will her appointment help Index objectively track threats to ‘free speech’? Relatedly, what about the escalating attempts to criminalise BDS using the suffocating, establishment-imposed orthodoxy which interprets all criticisms of Israel as antisemitic and therefore beyond the pale? What freedom of speech is enjoyed by ordinary citizens in Saudi Arabia, a ruthlessly repressive monarchy that we in the UK and US support in return for access to Saudi oil? What freedom of speech is enjoyed by people in, say, Venezuela or Bolivia, whose elected governments have been attacked or toppled by the regimes in the UK and US, or with their connivance, because their domestic economic policies fail to accord with Western capital’s priorities?
Can we really claim to champion free speech and democracy here in the UK, having seen a Labour leader systematically destroyed by pretty much the entire establishment - from the universally pro-capitalist media to the civil service to the right of his own party - for departing too far from the prevailing fanatical pro-capitalist orthodoxy? As another example, there’s our government’s recent announcement, supported by the newly Corbyn-free Labour Party, of prison terms of ten years for those who vandalise “war memorials” - by which they actually mean to further criminalise protest. Is that the action of a society that believes as strongly as it claims in freedom of speech? The reactionary mainstream parties in both the UK and US are both engaged in long-term schemes to gerrymander elections in their favour using redrawn boundaries and exclusion of voters. Is that democracy and free speech?
And I could go on with such rhetorical questions.
Those who decry the supposed curtailment by antifascist activists of the ‘free speech’ of racists and fascist sympathisers, far-right ideologues and fellow travellers, provocateurs and peddlers of pseudo-intellectual bullshit like The Bell Curve, all too usually fail to even notice as relevant the far worse curtailment of the liberties and lives of millions by the brutal system of imperialist and white supremacist capitalism that prevails in the world. All this might seem irrelevant but it is not. Politics is joined up. And politics has content as well as form. A blue shirt is not red because you write ‘red’ on it. A democracy is not democratic simply because it claims to be so. Our fearlessly independent, relentlessly questing pundits and commentators understand this about the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea’ yet seem to miss similar (if less blatant) hypocrisy when it happens here with ‘us’ (the most abused word in politics). Free speech is not a priority simply because a legion of pundits and politicians constantly queue up to claim that it is. To know the nature and meaning - the content - of a political system, you need to look beyond its rhetoric and claims to see what it actually does, to see the actual condition of the people who actually live in it. First and foremost, to have free speech, one needs to be alive. It is no use to constantly claim to champion free speech for all when the actual content of your policies deprives millions of the most basic freedom - the freedom to exist - which all people require before they can speak. Even before the current Tory government allowed their ideology to cause the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people from Covid-19 just this year, previous Tory governments had killed 130,000 people via austerity. No sensible person credits the government’s claim to have invaded Iraq because of WMD because we know, as a matter of fact, that they knew - or had no excuse for not knowing - that Iraq had no WMD to speak of. Similarly, we should reject the claim that the Western ‘humanitarian interventionists’ invade or bomb places in order to bring democracy to them. We should be able, as a bare minimum, be able to look at the wreckage, carnage and slavery that Western intervention brought to Libya - as many predicted it would - and reject out of hand any idea that people in the imperialist establishment are actually motivated by democratic evangelism. Yet the ‘independent media’ and ‘free press’ in our ‘democratic’ societies endlessly repeat such assumptions as obvious fact. As many have pointed out, including famously Chomsky and Herman, ‘democratic’ societies have perfectly adequate systems of thought control and a compliant, propagandist media; ‘we’ just do it via structural filters like private ownership rather than state mandate. Similarly, when we know that the current economic system not only brings crushing poverty and deprivation, and thus grueling sickness and oppression, to millions, even when it is functioning ‘properly’, and that it is in a death spiral of falling profitability and escalating climate catastrophe, we should be able, again as a bare minimum, to dispense with any idea that freedom of anything, let alone speech, is a genuine priority for any of those who run and benefit from the system. If they actually believe their own PR, that’s their problem not ours. What sensible person designs their own political demands and programs around humouring the sanguinary delusions of, effectively, slavering homicidal maniacs?
Conversely, the left oppose such things, and seek a more equal and less repressive society.
Organised antifascists in particular - more likely than not left-wing radicals - are actively engaged in fighting against such things. Antifascists are far more likely to be speaking up against curtailments (direct or structural) on freedom of speech, not to mention freedom to live, by the same establishments that decry them as violent thugs. Where antifascists aim to affect the freedom of fascists, what they’re actually doing it seeking to curtail not the freedom to speak per se but rather to curtail the freedom to speak in ways that actively endanger people, to curtail the ability of fascists to do so without consequences, to curtail the ability of institutions to platform - and thus dignify and validate - fascists, either outright or without consequences.
It is true that many institutions know they cannot invite certain people to speak without bringing down consequences upon themselves. This is often stated as an obvious scandal. But the reasoning behind the disapproval is as often withheld as is the reasoning for the usual automatic approval of the government’s latest imperial daventure. But why should institutions be able to platform fascists without opposition or pushback? Are they guaranteed a lack of consequences? This is precisely why the right routinely conflate ‘free speech’ with what they’re actually talking about ‘consequence free speech’. It is the former they claim to be losing, yet they never shut up. It is the latter they’re actually losing, and rightly so because all speech, all public acts and interventions have consequences. That’s the point of doing or saying anything.
Fascists, and right-wingers generally, aim to make it only the groups they target who suffer the consequences of their intervention. Milo Yiannopolous was perfectly comfortable inflicting the consequences of his words and actions on the migrants and trans people he publicly targeted and doxxed. The movement that took it upon itself to protest his actions made it so that his speech acts had consequences for him too, and those who chose to enable his hateful persecutions.
It is difficult to calculate the amount of harm done by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein’s book The Bell Curve. It is a farrago of bad science and transparently poor arguments - destroyed time and time again - aimed at dignifying and popularising ideas about natural racial inequalities and pushing a hard right agenda of ‘welfare reforms’. Despite being comprehensively debunked, it has had a huge influence on policy. It’s not necessarily that neoliberal politicians needed to be persuaded, rather that they needed - and got - an intellectual justification with the ostensibly neutral imprimatur of disinterested ‘science’. Again, despite the claims of the book having been repeatedly debunked, Murray (the surviving author) is still routinely taken seriously. He has recently published a new book peddling similar claims. He was invited to Middlebury College to speak and this triggered a massive protest. The protest resulted in scuffles and suddenly this became the focus of a moral panic about authoritarian left-wing activists trying to stifle free speech. The reality was of course that the activists wanted to make it clear that the kind of stuff preached by Murray is both dangerous and inaccurate. The inaccuracy and dangerousness of his ideas was, naturally, of little concern to those on the right or in the mainstream who piously preached about the dangers of dogmatic left protestors - revealing how necessary it is that people like Murray and the institutions that dignify him be challenged, be made to undergo consequences for their actions: the mainstream continues to take seriously the discredited work of a pseudo-scientist pushing a hard-right agenda that has done material harm to generations of disadvantaged people. The freedoms of speech, life, opportunity, freedom itself of African Americans who are oppressed by neoliberal upwards redistribution of wealth and authoritarian policing, the New Jim crow, etc, are not on the radar of the people who whinge endlessly about Charles Murray’s freedom to make it worse and never suffer even so much as a moment of discomfort or challenge as a consequence. As Tom Paine once put it, “they pity the plumage and forget the dying bird”.
None of this should be taken as implying an equivalence between fascism and ‘normality’, even normality under capitalism. Normality may be the crisis, but that doesn’t mean that normal is as bad as fascism. If we point out the similarities between fascism and liberalism (as done by scholars like Ishay Landa) or fascism and neoliberalism (by scholars like Germa Bel), even if we acknowledge the point made by people like Aimee Cesaire and Frantz Fanon that fascism is in many respects the political method used by western ‘democracies’ in their colonies relocated back onto the country of the coloniser, that does not mean that we mean to imply that fascism is just a different, or even a slightly worse, version of what we already have. To point out the oppression and repression and savagery of capitalist ‘democracies’ is not to draw an equivalence with fascism… still less is it to fall into a version of the idiocies preached by charlatans like Dinesh D’souza and Jonah Goldberg, who conflate liberalism and fascism in order to blacken left-wing ideas - conflated with liberalism as a whole - as authoritarian.
Fascism regnant is class war from above utterly unleashed; in power it is a frontal and pitiless assault on all democratic aspects of capitalist societies. These democratic aspects, much as they might have been co-opted by the capitalist class, are nevertheless generally hard-won victories on the part of workers struggling from below. Fascism is the system lashing back on those victories and the struggle that won them, and even the workers’ capacity for such struggle. If normality is the crisis - and, looking around at endemic imperialist war and oppression, grinding poverty and inequality, unprecedented economic collapse, and onrushing environmental catastrophe, can we doubt that it is - then fascism is the crisis doubled, tripled, quadrupled, with all avenues for struggling against it closed off by a wall of bodies, all hope drowned in blood. This is the future liberals want, even if they don’t know it, if they recommend toleration of fascist movements unchallenged, or challenged only with debate.
It must never be forgotten that the ultimate aim of fascism is to seize power, so opposing fascism as a movement is a bid not only to protect all those targeted by the movement but all those who would be targeted by the fascist government once it was in a position to do so. Many people’s understanding of fascism is now warped by a media which uses them as decontextualised, de-historicised stock villains - an aestheticisation of politics which, ironically, corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of fascism as making politics aesthetic. This started before every Hollywood movie that needed a villain began using signifiers recalling Hitler and the Nazis. It has led to an unfortunate cultural awareness of fascists not only as deviant outliers who are easy to spot - an error which actively helped the presentable (“dapper”) ‘alt-right’ build media profiles - but also of the victims of fascism as primarily middle class white people.
A great swath of the media class think of themselves as the main victims, or potential victims, of fascism; fascism here being infringement upon the freedom of liberal writers, artists, intellectuals to do whatever they like without being watched or judged… either that or, to shift emphasis a little, fascism is seen as a flavour of a nebulous, authoritarian departure from ‘normal’, with right and left flavours being kindred opponents of an essentially rational and humane ‘centre’ representing the status quo. This is why they think of antifascists as fascists. They think of any attempt to interfere in the total prerogative of, say, university authorities to invite whomsoever they please to speaking engagements or debates, or journalists to platform or profile or interview whomsoever they please in the pages of their liberal journals, as more akin to their conception of tyranny. They have total faith in liberal verities like reason and debate, not realising what is more obvious to those lower down the hierarchy than them: that such things are more usually ideological tools of the status quo to justify, or at least normalise, the horror of the system than they are actual paths to some kind of neutral, objective truth which exists out there past politics and class and power relations.
So, when they toss fascist ideas around respectfully in order - as they see it - to disinfect with sunlight, those below them, those more likely to be directly and immediately affected by the rise of fascism, see a dangerous process of normalisation underway. When those lower down the hierarchy band together to try to stop this process by declaring zero tolerance for fascist ideas and fascist propaganda, zero tolerance for the normalisation and platforming and dignification of such things, they look, to the people higher up the hierarchy doing the debating, like dangerous authoritarians who want to put a block on free discussion and censor politically incorrect ideas.
The people who imagine they can block fascism by platforming it never seem to reflect on the fact that they keep trying just this, over and over again, and fascism - by current evidence - not only fails to die off in the squirts of supposedly antimicrobial debate but rather seems to grow in power, reach, and acceptability. I remember, more than a decade ago, the platforming of Nick Griffin on Question Time after the BNP won seats in the European Parliament. We were confidently told that not only was it necessary - by the liberal rules of fairness that fascists never obey and specifically aim to destroy - to platform him, it would also be effective in discrediting him. Instead, platforming him and simultaneously ambushing him with liberal centrist disapproval, doesn’t seem to have defeated fascism in Britain. The BNP may have gone the way of all flesh but a) that was due not to the BBC platforming and dignifying and mainstreaming them, but to the tireless work of antifascist activists, and b) other and more successful fascist and crypto-fascist organisations have arisen to take their place. The BBC - Question Time again, via its obsessive impulse to platform Nigel Farage and lob softball gerrymandered right-wing Tory audiences at him - helped one of them, UKIP, rise to the point where it could affect the manifestos of the mainstream parties and lead us to Brexit. The BBC then did the same thing again, platforming and dignifying the voice of pro-Brexit ressentiment. Around the same time, the US media was relentlessly pumping oxygen into Donald Trump’s campaign for President. It is, ironically, the very pampered and anxious and paranoid middle layers between workers and the capitalist ruling class - in this case professional journalists, the BBC, mainstream news, the corporate punditocracy - who, through their victim complex about being the victims of censorship, who help provide fascism with a base and platform after platform. Should fascism gain power, liberal hacks would find themselves on the hit list despite all the assistance they’ve provided over the years, because fascism regnant aims to annihilate every trace of liberal democracy. But the liberals and centrists always realise their suicidal mistake too late. The same orientation towards the power they serve and which partially privileges them causes them to be unable to make common cause with antifascists working from below, for exactly the same reason that they always mistrust the supposed dogmatism of the activist left.
The media - especially but by no means exclusively Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets - have been stressing (which is to say manufacturing) the threat of Antifa for a while now, especially since the events at Berkeley in 2017. But Berkeley was only one of several protests that year including the massive protest march in Boston. The number of people killed or seriously injured by Antifa in these protests, or any protests, or by left activism as a whole? Zero. 2017 was, of course, the same year we saw the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, where the resurgent far-right - in the throes of their attempted self-rebranding as the ‘alt-right’ - made their big attempt to step off the internet and get together IRL. It was at Unite the Right that nazi and white supremacist James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd of people protesting the incursion of people like him into their town (one could even call them ‘outside agitators’). Fields seriously injured several of them, leaving them maimed for life, and murdered Heather Heyer. Heyer was a member of the International Workers of the World and a committed antifascist, but was not a ‘member’ of ANTIFA because there’s no such organisation (in all caps or otherwise) and therefore you can’t be a member of it.
The flurry of panic-stricken denunciation and conspiracy theorising about Antifa in the last week has not just been an idiotic reflex on the part of the political and punditry classes - though undoubtedly it has been that. It has also been an attempt at, as Charlottesville anti-fascist activist Emily Gorcenski warned on Twitter, “the criminalisation of dissent”.
The way has been cleared over the last few years by a multitude of people. Picking on one as an example, there’s the perfidious right-wing opportunist Andy Ngô, as I write hanging around the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone alongside his associates the Proud Boys, who’ve already committed assaults there. Ngô is apparently mingling in the CHAZ in disguise, filming people in the hope of finding dirt he can sell to his own reactionary audience and a wider reactionary audience via his interviews. Ironically, by engaging in the sinister agenda of authoritarians (some of them very well funded), while hiding behind a hoodie and dark glasses, he more closely resembles the caricature of Antifa he’s making coin from peddling.
Ngô’s initial attempt to climb aboard the lucrative far-right ‘journalism’ gravy train was via the popular Islamophobia station. When a graduate student at Portland State University, Ngô was fired from the college newspaper after dishonestly spreading a misleading clip from an interfaith panel - shorn of context to make it look like a Muslim student was calling for the institution of a violent Islamic state - on social media and to Breitbart. He spun the consequences into lots of attention from right-wing media in which he posed as a persecuted truth-teller. There followed a legendarily ridiculous article for The Wall Street Journal called ‘A Visit to Islamic England’, in which Ngô doltishly implied that ‘Alcohol Restricted Zone’ signs on the streets of the East End are evidence that Tower Hamlets and Whitechapel are now miniature Islamic caliphates. Licking his resultant social media wounds, and in search of a new grift, he switched to the comparatively (then) uncluttered field of lying about Antifa. He was caught on camera by an undercover activist, smirking as his associates in the fascist street gang Patriot Prayer (whose violence he never reports on) plotted provocation and violence against Antifa at a Portland demonstration. Later, at the same event, a Patriot Prayer member broke a woman’s neck. Ngô doxxed her while posing as the victim of unprovoked attacks from left-wingers. The emergence of the video showing Ngô standing close to Patriot Prayer as they planned their assault was followed with suspicious post haste by his departure from a gig at online race science journal Quillette. When he was still with them, Quillette published an article implying pro-Antifa bias on the part of various ‘journalists’ (many of them actually just left-wing Twitter users) which led to credible death threats from violent nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division. Ngô and his Quillette editor denied then downplayed the danger.
Ngô has continued to act as the eyes and ears (and camera) of far-right groups at demonstrations and protests, to the point where activists have grown so justly afraid of his attention and the consequences it brings (online and IRL) that he got himself attacked in the infamous ‘concrete milkshake’ incident at a Portland Proud Boys rally. I’m not victim blaming when I blame him for what was done to him on that occasion because, given the danger he represents to activists, he could hardly claim to be ‘the victim’ of anything but his own accurate reputation. Plus, he courts the negative attention. Then, every time he gets it, he runs to the media to play professional victim and brave journalist. Ngô has spun a profitable scam out of posing as a courageous, truth telling, expert Antifa-watcher, exposing them as a Marxist, anarchist, communist conspiracy to destroy democracy (unlike fascism, which of course loves democracy). He hasn’t just peddled this line on TV for fascistic propagandist Tucker Carlson. He is seen as someone to be taken seriously distressingly often by a distressing number of ostensibly serious outlets. Andrew Neil, unfortunately one of the UK’s most prominent political television journalists, retweeted a Ngô article about Antifa, thus endorsing him as someone to be taken seriously on the subject with all the (waning) authority of the BBC.
Thanks to the media, especially since Seattle 1999 when the fixation began, a lot of people, hearing the phrase ‘Antifa’, instantly see those more properly known as the Black Block, or those who seemingly model themselves on them. Black clothes. Masks. Etc. One can have issues with the Black Block, both in terms of theory and practice, but the fact is that they are a relatively small presence amidst the protests. Though routinely conflated with Antifa as a whole in the media, and thus in the perceptions of the public, they are far from the only people engaged in antifascist action. It is also the case that, in a world which seems all too willing to tolerate the forward march of the far-right, the Black Block are sometimes the ones who stand between the fascists and the relative few who are prepared to come out and face them on the streets. Many a protestor will tell you that, ideological and strategic quibbles aside, they have been very glad to see the masked and armed people in black standing between them and armed nazis. At Charlottesville, protestors found themselves being directly protected by masked and armed activists from violent fascist attack. Had it not been for such people, the death toll at Charlottesville could well have been higher. This could be an extrapolated metaphor for not only the Black Block but Antifa and all antifascist protestors generally. Are they perfect? Certainly not. But there are a lot of people in this world who feel safer for knowing there’s someone standing between them and the barbarians who want to kill them. They certainly can’t rely on the police for help. The liberal and centrist punditry would pontificate profoundly about their deaths or maimings after the event but would never stand in the way of it happening. Indeed, such people tend to condemn those who do. Before anyone criticises the Black Block, or Antifa generally (which is certainly something we can do), we should admit that they’re often the only ones putting their bodies on the line to keep the nazis away from the people they want to hurt.
Much is made of this image of Antifa as masked thugs, attacking free speech. Subscribe to Cursed Boomer Images on Twitter and you’ll see plenty of cartoons featuring the KKK on one side, Antifa (black clothes, masks, etc) on the other, with captions on both sides saying something like “Wears masks and persecutes people who disagree with them”. This is only one instantiation of a widely perceived similarity. It is, of course, a false equivalence. There can be no meaningful equivalence between, on the one hand, people whose ideology (whatever they say) is inherently anti-democratic and intrinsically genocidal, and, on the other hand, people who are trying to stop them. Fascism is not just another viewpoint among viewpoints, deserving of a seat at the table and a fair hearing. It is a cancer which eats into democracy. Disguised as an opinion, it infiltrates the conversation like a virus. If allowed a seat at the table, it takes the table and kills anyone seated at the table who objects. Given a fair hearing, it spews nonsense, vanishes into the squid ink it squirts out so as to avoid any meaningful debate, talks over the heads of those trying to speak to it in good faith, and aims poison directly at the audience, some of whom - it knows - will lap it off their faces. Once it has spread enough poison, it refashions things so that nobody else ever gets a fair hearing. It cannot, liberal and centrist platitudes aside, be disinfected with sunlight. As Sartre famously pointed out, it is not that antisemites (and here we can extrapolate to all fascists since a fascist is almost always an antisemite) don’t know they’re talking nonsense; they just don’t care, because making sense is simply not what they’re trying to do, just as convincing people through debate is not really their aim. Fascism cannot be debated and reasoned and logicked into submission. It can only be stopped from spreading. To try to stop fascists spreading their ideas is not to attack free speech; it is to defend free speech. There is nothing more anti-free speech than fascism. It is the annihilation not only of the particular rights and freedoms of those people it victimises specifically but also the annihilation of any democracy that exists anywhere for anyone in the territory where it takes hold. From a socialist point of view, it is the defeat of the working class by a pathological ideology growing from and feeding on the incoherent anxieties and yearnings of the middle classes, the petty bourgeoisie, managers, cops, etc. Once it gains power, this ideology leads inexorably to the rule of the worst aspects and instincts of capitalism, from repression to racism to imperialism, all in the service of national big business and finance capital.
There is an extent, of course, to which the media distorts the reality of Antifa simply because that’s what the media does. It has a built in bias towards concentrating on things that are dramatic, scary, violent. It’s the same syndrome whereby the media will focus on the few arrests or broken windows while leaving hours of peaceful demonstration by overwhelmingly peaceful people unreported. This “oooh, shiny thing!” mentality is also partly why the media leaves the issues demonstrators and activists care about to one side, relegating them to side mentions or, at best, hopelessly insufficient vox pops or debates.
The ‘neutrality’ paradigm is another reason. The media cling to what John Pilger once called the “narrow band of thinkable thought”. All that falls within this band is unquestioningly taken to be true, or at least plausible and unexceptionable. All that falls outside it is taken to be inherently fringe, wacky, eccentric, untrustworthy. It is thus the job of the responsible objective journalist, charged with bringing an unfiltered snapshot of reality to the viewer or reader, to leave it out, or - when forced to by people who insist upon raising it - to treat it with the suspicion it deserves. The pronouncements of power are almost always taken as reasonable, if debateable. Power is inherently respectable, thus its assertions are respectable. To stay respectable, one must exist somewhere within the mainstream, tacitly defined as the zone around power. Then the job for the journalist is to present both sides (really just different permutations of the mainstream) ‘neutrally’. The arguments outside the mainstream cannot be fairly represented since, to what Chomsky called the “properly educated orthodox mind”, to introduce them at all is to distort a sensible presentation into something trivial and unbalanced. To neutrally discuss claims which fall outside the mainstream is inherently to drift away from neutrality, neutrality being the band around established power.
Protests are not just digressions from the zone around power, and thus forays into the inherently non-respectable, and therefore an irresponsible object of focus. They are also diffuse, leaderless, and usually focus on big and complex issues. These are usually about issues the media can’t talk about without drifting out of what they perceive as responsible neutrality into what they perceive as bias and triviality. They are usually issues that the media, from lack of practice or interest, do not know how to talk about, and are not even able to talk about. It is often also the case, as Nick Davies pointed out in Flat Earth News, that today’s media often are not equipped technically or financially to report on complex topics. They literally lack the resources to do anything but practice ‘churnalism’, i.e. the regurgitation of syndicated stories and press releases. This isn’t an accident, or the result of a natural process, of course. It’s something that has been done to the media. It’s a side-effect of the private ownership of the means whereby current information is socially disseminated, and how the neoliberal transformation has corroded the standards held even by private owners of the past. Media has become more and more corporate owned, owned by fewer and fewer companies - in line with what Marx called the “concentration and centralisation of capital” - and, with neoliberalism succeeding social democracy, more and more ‘rationalised’ and downsized, i.e. streamlined to its real sole purpose: making a profit for the capitalist class. This is a win/win situation for capitalism, or at least seems to be, because, as it squeezes more and more profit from media (or tries to… print media is dying anyway), it also synergistically makes the content of media more conducive to reproducing the rule of capital, by flattening it and emptying it of content, thus depriving the working population of the information they need in order to see the true nature of their society. We can see this exact dynamic at work in many ways, but the treatment of Antifa is a good example. The narrative of the scary, violent, terrorist group of sinister ‘outsider agitator’ extremists isn’t just attractive ideologically to a class which is both disdainful and terrified of struggles from below, it’s also attractive narratively for media that prefers to tell a dramatic story rather than explain issues or complexities, and for a media that needs to be able to quickly repeat a formula that has worked in the past and requires no research. It is precisely this ideological adroitness from the point of view of the ruling class that makes it go virtually unquestioned, in no need of being backed up with mere evidence. Another synergistic syndrome of relevance here is the ubiquitous media habit - both cheap and ideologically in line with their worldview - of uncritically reporting the version of events that comes from official sources.
Indeed, much as we can see the inexorable logic of the ‘outside agitators’ trope from the point of view of the political economy of media in the era of decaying neoliberalism, we can also see the exact same trope (in various forms) if we go back and look at media (and establishment) responses to struggle going back decades, centuries, possibly even longer. (Personally I suspect the ‘outside agitators’ canard probably goes back to Spartacus, and probably earlier.)
It will be objected that the media do indeed sometimes point out when this or that sheriff or police chief or DA or mayor makes a spurious claim about 70 to 90 per cent of the people they’ve arrested at a protest being from elsewhere. We’ve seen this happen repeatedly over the last weeks. The pattern endlessly repeats.