At Weaving Our Worlds, we discussed the rise of fascism globally and what it means for building resistance and solidarity. To start, we found these explanations of fascism helpful. Our reading list is included below.
- Fascism always supports global capitalism.
“One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality… At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement… It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis.” – George Jackson
“While fascism’s core function is to intervene in this struggle on the side of capitalism, the way it fulfills its function varies across time, place, and conditions. This means our analysis of fascism is underdeveloped if we focus solely (or even primarily) on fascism in Europe after World War I; instead, we must take the principles with us and analyze how fascism lives and moves everywhere, at all times.” – Leslie James
- Fascism fosters extreme scapegoating, and relies on both state & deputized civilian repression. Though fascism is anti-socialist, social-fascism appeals to nationalized working and middle class despairs.
Previously, this post included a quote of Zak Cope explaining that although fascism is anti-socialist, social-fascism appeals to nationalized working and middle class despairs. We read the quote from the section of Indigenous Action’s Zine “Fascism & Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective” which covered the history of different definitions of fascism. We have since learned that Zak Cope has renounced his former anti-imperialist views, including the book Divided World Divided Class that this quote was taken from. The publisher of this book Kersplebedeb Publishing released a statement standing by Cope’s previous work and denouncing his current position. *You can read the full statement by his publishers “Kersplebedeb Statement on Zak Cope’s About Face (Aug. 16 2024)”
“[T]his planetary wave of authoritarianism converges around three core elements. First, some version of the “great replacement” theory, the racist myth that there is a “globalist” plot to replace “native” populations with migrants. Second, homophobic and transphobic moral panics claiming that society has been overtaken by an anti-family “gender ideology.” Third, backlash against challenges to the racial-capitalist order, from U.S. right-wing attacks on “critical race theory” to the now-global “war on woke” (a term that’s been exported abroad, so that Italians now ludicrously refer to il wokismo, the French to le wokisme, and so on). – Albert Toscano
- Fascists can articulate statist or anti-statist tendencies but co-exist with liberalism and diffused power.
“[L]iberalism and fascism can coexist not only in terms of the ways in which the economic imperatives of capitalism help breed fascism, but also liberalism itself is experienced differently, sometimes as fascistic, by different polities… in the sense of the exercise of complete arbitrary power and violence by that dominant population towards the racialized, minoritized and stigmatized portion of the population.” – Albert Toscano
“[L]iberals, as their track record clearly demonstrates, are first and foremost focused on preserving the US empire as the primary means to maintaining the US position of hegemon within the capitalist world-system. This means that when push comes to shove, they will compromise with the neo-confederate and neo-fascist forces in order to preserve the capitalist system and their shared elevated position within it.” – Kali Akuno
- Fascism is imperialism turned inwards & accelerated
“People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “[T]hat it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.” – Aimé Césaire
“The same British colonizers set the stage for this counterrevolutionary state violence in both Sudan and Palestine through colonial agreements and betrayals, creating the fertile soil for ethno-nationalist, violent, extractive states to emerge; states for which the supremacy of some is predicated on the dehumanization and dispossession of others.” – Nisrin Elamin
“Fascism in north amerika can only occur in a context always-already defined by two fundamental axes of violence: indigenous genocide and antiblackness. These two axes, while being somewhat incommensurable with one another, also overlap, and of course also intersect with the general parasitism of the imperialist countries upon the Third World and other colonized peoples worldwide… The principal threat then of fascism to colonized peoples is not one that we would move from a state of having not been subjected to violence from every angle to one where we would, but rather that the pacing of the eliminative and accumulative logics of settler colonialism would be accelerated.” – Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh
- How Do We Fight Fascism Today
“Build resistance movements and build a large enough movement that cannot be controlled by the state so that, as I said before, it’s ungovernable. And ungovernable means a number of things to people in the movement right now: it means the kind of tactics you engage in the street, it means how the community is organized that they don’t have to depend on these politicians, it means a mass boycott of capitalist corporations, a new transitional economy, and many others things as part of a resistance.” – Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
“We do not have to love people or fully agree with them to practice reciprocal care, or to lock arms against fascism. In the months and years ahead, we will need to show up for each other in some scary ways. Some of us will have to put our bodies on the line to protect and defend one another. Sustained solidarity of that caliber does not happen by accident. It must be built and reinforced over time… We will need that solidarity to fight fascist scapegoating, and to develop a shared understanding that an injury to any community that’s being vilified and dehumanized by the fascists is an attack on us all.” – Ejeris Dixon
Sources and What We Read
Ungovernable: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation, September 2020
https://blackrosefed.org/ungovernable-interview-lorenzo-komboa-ervin-anderson/
Late Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano Protean Magazine, November 2023
https://proteanmag.com/2023/11/24/late-fascism-an-interview-with-alberto-toscano/
The Rise of the Far Right Is a Global Phenomenon by Alberto Toscano, In These Times, November 2023
https://inthesetimes.com/article/global-far-right-meloni-milei-putin-bannon-orban
From Palestine to Sudan: Solidarity with Our Students by Nisrin Elamin American Anthropologist, 2024
https://www.americananthropologist.org/online-content/from-palestine-to-sudan
Fascism, by George Jackson An excerpt from Blood in My Eye, 1971
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J-ovYnDvGfoxWpexsdBctU-moxoSgTo0udxyHVLtQxA/edit?tab=t.0
What lessons on fascism can we learn from Africa’s colonial past? by Leslie James Africa is a Country, January 2017
https://africasacountry.com/2017/01/what-lessons-on-fascism-can-we-learn-from-africas-colonial-past/
“We Surrender Nothing and No One”: A Playbook for Solidarity Amid Fascist Terror. Interview with Ejeris Dixon, truthout, June 2020
https://truthout.org/audio/we-surrender-nothing-and-no-one-a-playbook-for-solidarity-amid-fascist-terror/
On Fascism: An Afrikan Perspective by Matthew Glover and Joshua Ingram, The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project, October 2024
https://lpeproject.org/blog/on-fascism-an-afrikan-perspective/
‘Zine: Fascism & Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective By Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh, Indigenous Action, February 2018
https://www.indigenousaction.org/zine-fascism-anti-fascism-a-decolonial-perspective/
Some Thoughts on What Can Be Done to withstand the Neo-Confederate/Neo-Fascist Conquest of Power by Kali Akuno, Navigating the Storm, January 2022
http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2022/01/some-thoughts-on-what-can-be-done-to.html?m=1
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, 1955