The point of this blog is to give me a space and a reason to think hard about how fascism can be fought, and maybe even defeated, today. Now granted, that’s a tall order. It’s likely that what I’ll end up with is something like one of those “Towards a [BLANK]” essays that critical theorists loved to write at the end of the neoliberal era, before the return of the far right lit some fires under the left and progressives.
Fighting fascism today cannot, and will not, be the same as it was last time. This is transparently, unavoidably true, and not only because the same river cannot be crossed twice. Time has passed, and the world is simply a different one than it was in the 1930s. Union membership is down, the era of mass politics is over, and the Soviet Union* no longer exists. Fighting fascism
My intention with this next series of essays is to consider what those differences are - what makes today different from the previous defeat of fascism - to determine what our advantages and disadvantages are. Today’s essay will lay the groundwork for that process.
To start, we need to establish the ground for several terms that I’ll be using in this discussion. The first of these is, of course, fascism - but please bear with me! My goal here isn’t to be one of those antiquarian academics who argue that the term can only be applied in certain limited contexts, or even to spend an enormous amount of time arguing over definitions. Instead, I just want to propose a rough-and-ready definition: which I’ll take from Chapter One of my book, How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism:
Fascism: A nationalist, anti-liberal, sexist, and violent right-wing political movement that aims to remake the world.
Does this definition cover every single facet of all the fascist movements that have ever existed? Of course not. But it is a useful starting point to keep us grounded, and to make sure that we’re not using fascism only as an insult that means “movement I dislike.”
Of course the next question facing us is: what is antifascism? This is an equally difficult to answer, and given the actions of the Trump administration to criminalize association with “antifa,” a potentially dangerous one. But we’re going to keep it simple here and define this as any person or movement that is opposed to fascism. Vitally, antifascism is not an ideology exclusive to the left, or even the center. There are, and have historically been, many conservative antifascists. I’ll return to this subject in later parts of this series.
The last thing that needs to be understood about fascism is that it is revolutionary - which partly explains why there are now and have always been many conservatives who oppose it. Fascism is not simply an expression of the ruling classes, as many Marxist activists said both in the early 20th century and some say today. Dismissing it as such represents a failure to understand who fascists are, and what they represent on the right. Fascists are not just more conservative than conservatives, they are something else. They don’t just not play by the rules. They want to remake the world.
Like all revolutionaries they rely on images, slogans, and ideas that come from the past, but they fundamentally want something new and different. In their case, this is a post-liberal participatory violent sexist racist nationalist community, organized and run along lines that are distinct from how our contemporary world works. Their radicalism was on full display in the early 20th century, and is also apparent now in their support for suspension of elections, militarism, and their radical gender ideology.
Now that I’ve established what fascism is for our purposes here, I’ll give a framework for the coming essays. Each of the following will examine one of the ways that fascism was opposed in the past - through labor organizing, through international cooperation, through war, through propaganda, through counter-organizing, etc., as well as how strong various movements are compared to historical counterparts. Then I’ll examine what is different and what is the same about that potential fight today. Along the way I’ll be tallying advantages and disadvantages we have over the early 20th century.
My intention here is for us to be brutally honest with ourselves about where we stand today. We can’t afford to get this wrong.
*Nothing in this post or in subsequent posts should be understood as Soviet apologia. The Soviets committed terrible crimes against humanity.