Please find below the audio-visual recordings of five workshops, panels, and book presentations from the 8th LA Anarchist Book Fair. I moderated the presentation from Solidarity Collectives and the panel on Ukraine and Anarchist Internationalism.
Presentation from Solidarity Collectives (Ukraine) (audio only)
“Fighters on the Aragón front, 1937” by Kati Horna (International Institute of Social History/Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica)
In The Politics of Unreason (2017), Lars Rensmann poses an important question about fascism and anti-Semitism: namely, are these oppressive phenomena “specific to German or European culture—or rather universal, the byproduct of universal authoritarian phenomena, susceptibilities, and tendencies in modern society […?].”1
This book review essay seeks to answer this question and explore fascism and the far right by examining five recently published anti-fascist (Antifa) and anti-authoritarian volumes: namely, Lars Rensmann’s own The Politics of Unreason; ¡No Pasarán! (2022), edited by Shane Burley; Ilham Tohti’s We Uyghurs Have No Say (2022); Luke Cooper’s Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy (2021); and Charles Reitz’s The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse (2022). In general, we agree with the theorists of the Frankfurt School—like Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—who held that “fascism could happen anywhere,” and that authoritarianism is a “more or less universal modern phenomenon.”2 Likewise, we concur with Paul Gilroy, who writes that “barbarity can appear anywhere, at any time.”3
Accordingly, as we explore these five books, we will confront not only the “brown” fascism indelibly associated with Benito Mussolini, National Socialism (or Nazism), Trumpism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, but also Black, “red” (Communist), Syrian, Indian, and Chinese fascism and authoritarianism. Then, before concluding, we will present some anti-fascist perspectives on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine—thus converging, hopefully, with Talia Lavin’s interpretation of Antifa as “a movement of protection.”4
¡No Pasarán! and Decolonizing Fascism
In his essay for ¡No Pasarán!, Matthew N. Lyons interprets the strengthening of far-right forces in the U.S. neither as any aberration to its settler-colonial society, as many liberals hold, nor as a mere tool of hyper-capitalist rule, as many radicals (especially Marxists) claim. Instead, by applying his framework of a “three way fight” among leftists, rightists, and the State, Lyons situates fascists and the far-right as “autonomous force[s] counterposed to both the left and the capitalist state.” Through his analysis of what he terms the U.S. right’s “three big upsurges of the past half century,” Lyons demonstrates the far-right’s often-antagonistic stance toward oppressed people, leftists, their intersections, and the established authorities. In this sense, given the right’s deeply anti-egalitarian commitments, its reluctance to call capitalism into question, and its opportunistic and ultraviolent tactics, Lyons’ chapter may be read as a warning that “the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.”5 Such a lesson carries important warnings for anarchists about not only the far-right but also the authoritarian left.
In “The Black Antifascist Tradition: A Primer” and “Five Hundred Years of Fascism,” Jeannelle K. Hope and Mike Bento, respectively, consider the connections between white supremacy and fascism for ¡No Pasarán! from decolonial points of view. Reflecting on Aimé Césaire’s comment in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) that fascism is imperialism brought back to Europe, and working from the Bulgarian Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov’s definition of fascism (presented before the Communist International in 1935) as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” Hope and Bento assert that “[a]ll colonized people [have] lived under fascist rule,” such that their resistance has of necessity been anti-fascist. Along these lines, Hopes interprets the “We Charge Genocide” (1951) report and petition, co-written by Black intellectuals William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. DuBois; the Black Panther Party; the Black Liberation Army; Black Lives Matter; and carceral abolition movements, among others, as anti-fascist.6
There is little doubt that colonial, imperial, and racist violence, as crystallized in the annihilation of Indigenous peoples, the slave trade of Africans, and slavery, has deeply animated fascist politics. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), Hannah Arendt describes a set of “boomerang effects,” whereby European imperialism in Africa—specifically, Germany’s genocides of the Herero and Nama peoples in southwestern Africa (1904–8)—served as “the most fertile soil” for Nazism.7 Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazis followed the examples of British colonialism in India and the settler-colonial USA, while also looking to the Hindu caste system for inspiration for racial hierarchies.8 Similarly, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists “drew deeply” from the British Empire, just as Spanish Nationalists and Franquists appeal to nostalgia for imperialist domination.9 In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the harrowing ultraviolence carried out by Euro-American settlers against Indigenous communities to observe “Manifest Destiny” and expand U.S. borders.10
Furthermore, history shows that millions of enslaved Africans perished both during abduction to the Americas, and due to bonded labor and racist terror in the thirteen colonies and the independent U.S. As Bento, DuBois, and the Jewish anti-Zionist Norman G. Finkelstein have acknowledged, lynching in the American South was a widespread genocidal practice that predated the legal classification of the crime.11 The ongoing wanton violence visited by police on Black men in U.S. society is a part of this rotten historical continuum. Plus, Ken Burns’ new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust(2022), evinces how widespread anti-Semitic attitudes in the U.S. government, and among average citizens, contributed to a failure to intervene against Hitler’s genocide of European Jews. Prior to U.S. entry into World War II, masses of pro-Nazi Americans propagandized in favor of Hitler via the America First Committee, while agitating against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and advocating for a fascist State.12 In reality, as revealed by one of the Frankfurt School’s studies in exile, Antisemitism among American Labor (1944–5), only a small majority of surveyed workers unconditionally rejected Nazi crimes against Jews, while nearly a fifth supported them.13
For Lars Rensmann, the Shoah, or Holocaust, represents a historical “caesura” and the “world’s ‘central injustice’”: a “previously unimaginable extreme evil.” He is concerned that making comparisons to the Shoah may trivialize its meaning and the “still unmastered legacy of the Holocaust,” just as Benjamin Zachariah worries that the “moral comparison of colonialism and fascism” can “produc[e …] what we might call a ‘concept deflation,’” whereby the term fascism loses its specific meaning.14 Shane Burley, editor of ¡No Pasarán!, expresses similar doubts about the equation of racism and colonialism with fascism in a panel discussion about the book with Firestorm Coop. Despite herself being a Black Panther, Angela Davis likewise disagreed with the Party’s organizing a United Front Against Fascism in 1969, as she found it “incorrect and misleading to inform people that we were already living under fascism.”15 Indeed, the rhetorical equation of liberalism with fascism overlooks how many colonized peoples rejected the Axis powers by supporting the Allies and waging anti-colonial, anti-fascist armed struggle during World War II, thus contributing greatly to formal decolonization in the post-war context.16 Therefore, while liberalism, imperialism, and fascism are related—with the former two opening the possibility for the latter—the means and ends of liberalism cannot be equated with those of fascism.
Black Authoritarianism and Stalinism
By essentializing Black resistance as necessarily being Antifa, Hope ignores the conspiratorial anti-Semitism promoted by individuals and groups like Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam (NOI), Kanye West, and Black Hebrew Israelites. This is not to mention the fascist enthusiasm expressed by Black Hammer after Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several African states have likewise supported Russia’s ruthless bid to recolonize Ukraine. In contrast to the Black Americans who served in the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic, North Africans fought in Francisco Franco’s insurgency against it.17 As well, in 1937, just as Italy occupied Ethiopia, the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, Jr.—referring to his mass-organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association—claimed, “We were the first Fascists,” and that “Mussolini copied fascism from me.” The next year, C.L.R. James suggested that Garvey’s “storm troopers” in “parades” anticipated Hitler, too. Indeed, Garvey dreamed of mass-repatriation to an “African Empire” enshrining a “superstate,” and repudiated class struggle while preaching violence and anti-Semitism. Such views, in turn, inspired the founders of the NOI. Echoing his father’s enigmatic Black fascism, in 1974, Marcus Garvey III hailed “African National Socialism” and looked forward to an “African ‘Anschluss’ [… and] ‘Lebensraum.’”18
Besides this, Hope does not contest the highly uncritical attitudes that several of her sources take toward the Soviet Union, as an ostensible alternative to the racial capitalism of the settler-colonial, imperialist USA. In parallel, Bento questionably casts Dimitrov, a Stalinist bureaucrat, as a “revolutionary critic of European society.”19 Together, these authors present authoritarian Communism as progressive, authentic, and left-wing, but these are dangerous misrepresentations, in light of the following historical facts: the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt and Tambov uprisings, and of the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine; the horrors of Holodomor and forcible collectivization; the nefarious part played by Stalin and his agents in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9); the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, which facilitated World War II and the Holocaust, and even involved Stalin leasing Hitler a secret submarine base; the colonialism practiced by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Siberia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe; the mass-deportations of minorities; the widespread detention of political prisoners in the Gulag; escalations toward nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Soviet regime’s sexism and criminalization of homosexuality. For all these reasons and more, anti-fascism and internationalism cannot be consistent with support for the USSR. After all, the Soviet Union implemented a model of red fascism that must be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Syrian Ba’athism and Hindutva
During his incarceration by the British authorities in the 1930’s, the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy distinguished theoretically among “Italian, German, and Indian fascisms.”20 In ¡No Pasarán!, Leila al-Shami and Shon Meckfessel contribute to this project of analyzing diverse fascist movements by considering Syrian Baa’thism—a form of fascism—and its affinities with the U.S. far-right. The authors note how the Ba’athist state’s centralism, corporatism, militarism, and brazen ultraviolence attract and animate the global fascist movement. Not for nothing did Syria’s Ba’athists grant sanctuary to the Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who trained the brutal mukhabarat (secret police) in exchange. Authoritarians around the world admire the impunity that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his backer Putin have enjoyed for their genocidal counter-revolution against a widespread popular uprising that began in 2011. Fox News conspiracists and GrayZone bloggers alike harp on the regime’s innocence for atrocious chemical-weapons attacks, in cases where Assad’s forces are responsible beyond any reasonable doubt.21 In this light, GrayZone would appear to mimic Fox‘s business model, as highlighted by the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the 2020 U.S. presidential election, through its airing of demonstrably false claims for profit.
Yet, it has sadly not only been the far-right that has contributed to Assad and Putin’s victories. In the wake of the catastrophic U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003–11), many Western leftists, especially Marxists, have abandoned the Syrians openly fighting the regime for twelve years now. According to Sri Lankan trade unionist Rohini Hensman, this pseudo-anti-imperialist phenomenon responds to demands for conformity with campist geopolitical notions about unquestionable solidarity with “anti-imperialist” states and power blocs against the West.22 Presumably for similar reasons, many Euro-American anarchists have guarded silence on Assad for years, preferring to focus on the progressive accomplishments of the Rojava Revolution. Still, avoiding a critical confrontation with Ba’athism is to be expected of Marxists, in light of their track record on the USSR and Maoist China, but less so of anarchists, considering our supposedly radical anti-statism. In this sense, recalling the tragic fate of the Spanish Civil War over eighty years ago, the destruction of the Syrian Revolution—which has taken up to a million lives, and displaced millions of others—gravely illuminates the left’s vast shortcomings and contradictions. As al-Shami and Meckfessel observe, such an unfortunate turn of events leads us to muse over what an authentic anti-fascist internationalism might look like.23
Undoubtedly, if we return to Roy’s theoretical distinctions, this cause of global anti-fascism would require that Western antifascists “support their South Asian comrades against Hindutva,” or Hindu nationalism, as Maia Ramnath writes in “The Other Aryan Supremacy,” her essay for ¡No Pasarán! The toxic Hindutva movement, championed by India’s authoritarian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, represents an aggressive repudiation of the secular-democratic pluralism envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, the post-colonial country’s first prime minister, and the long-ruling Indian Congress Party, which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now defeated twice at the polls: namely, in 2014 and 2019. Along these lines, the expulsion of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi from parliament in March 2023 bodes especially poorly for India’s political future. Modi’s conservative authoritarianism is underwritten by big business, writes Arundhati Roy. According to Ramnath, present-day Hindutva is a mix that “includes precolonial brahminism, internalized colonial-era Orientalist tropes, and pathologies of postcolonial nationalism, which distort anticolonial rhetoric” to shore up convention and social hierarchy.24
After all, it was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist from the fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who assassinated Mohandas K. Gandhi 75 years ago. Godse was retaliating against the spiritual leader’s secular-republican politics and calls for peaceful co-existence with Muslims following the bloody Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Moreover, as a prominent sanghi (fundamentalist extremist) of the RSS, which created the BJP as a political front in 1980, Modi both incited Hindu mass-violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and ordered police to stand down against pogromists, as the state’s chief minister at the time. In fact, in January 2023, Modi’s government invoked emergency laws to censor a new BBC documentary on the prime minister’s role in this wave of communal violence, just as a feature film about Godse is on the horizon for the Indian market. Demonstrating the entrenchment of Hindu chauvinism, Ramnath reports that “[t]he frequency of lynchings and atrocities against Dalits and Muslims has leaped significantly since 2014,” whereas Modi’s rule has only intensified India’s occupation of Muslim-majority Kashmir, in a manner reminiscent of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.25
Ramnath traces the bleak dialectic, whereby Nazi racial theory took after German Indologists’ examination of Brahminical society, while Hindutva enthusiasts in turn have mobilized Brahminism in the fashion of Italian Fascism and German ultranationalism. In India, RSS front groups have targeted Christians, Muslims, communists, and intellectuals, and agitated in favor of the demolition of mosques built during the Mughal Empire (1526–1858), a Muslim dynasty. Meanwhile, many Hindutva sympathizers from the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. have aligned themselves with Trump and white supremacy. In this sense, the uncritical views that Hindu nationalists take toward the caste system complement alt-right, neo-Nazi notions about “natural hierarchies” well.26
Akin to Assadists, Hindu nationalists tend to affirm pseudo-anti-imperialism. In other words, they use post-colonial, anti-Western discourse to strengthen the cause of Brahminical fascism. Sanghis focus on such strategies in rather bad faith, considering Ramnath’s point that “[c]olonialism and empire in South Asia are not just about European versus Asian, but [also about] various centralizing states versus various regions and borderlands, ancient and modern,” such that South Asians, especially Indians, cannot “shun[t] all blame for all ills to colonialism.” In contrast, a more authentic anti-imperialism would be anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, humanist, and caste-abolitionist.27
China’s Genocide of Uyghurs
In The Search for Neofascism (2006), A. James Gregor argues that Maoist (1949–1978) and post-Maoist China (1978–present) have instituted “fascism with Chinese characteristics.” In reality, Gregor recounts how Ugo Spirito, one of Mussolini’s main ideologues, visited China in the early 1960’s, and came to admire Maoism’s anti-liberalism, anti-individualism, and totalitarian regimentation as reminiscent of Fascist Italy. Through its corporatism, hyper-nationalism, militarism, and aggressive expansionism—especially targeting Taiwan—the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has arguably imposed a fascist regime.28
We Uyghurs Have No Say (2022) features translations of the writings of Ilham Tohti, a progressive economist from China’s mostly Muslim Uyghur minority whose father died tragically during the Maoist Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Tohti himself has been serving a life sentence for “separatism” since 2014. Despite his criticisms of the CCP, he is a minority intellectual who sought to work within its constitutional framework to improve the condition of his fellow Uyghurs, and to increase autonomy through legal channels, while opposing calls for the independence of so-called ‘East Turkestan.’ Though he sought a “win-win situation” for Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese alike, based on his support for ethnic self-determination, national unity, and “Chinese patriot[ism],” Tohti merely ended up being punished by the State for his speech, thought, and action.29
Spanning the years 2005–2014, the dissident’s essays and interviews collected in this volume trace the increasingly suffocating atmosphere for Uyghurs in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. In parallel, Tohti increasingly senses that “the Chinese government is trying to get rid of me.” As Rian Thum clarifies in the preface, these commentaries predate the CCP’s openly genocidal policies, beginning in 2017, of sequestering millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, forcibly separating Uyghur children from their families, and destroying thousands of mosques. Through his critical analysis of what he terms another “Great Cultural Revolution that is destroying the indigenous culture,” Tohti provides profound insights, according to Thum, into “a world of multipolar colonialism”—that is, one in which numerous States and power-blocs compete in a ‘Great Game’ of colonialism. As the Indian ex-Stalinist Kavita Krishnan describes, “Multipolarity has always meant multi-imperialism [and] multi-despotism.” Tohti’s text thus provocatively shows that the “West’s monopoly on imperialism has been broken, if in fact it ever existed.”30
Notably, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has sought to rationalize these ghastly policies against Uyghurs and other ethnoreligious minorities by explicitly emphasizing security and stability over human rights. In 2018, an editorial in the official Global Times newspaper declared that the crackdown was necessary to avert Xinjiang becoming “China’s Syria” or “China’s Libya.” In 2019, The New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” which reveal that Xi had “urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s ‘war on terror’ after the Sept. 11 attacks” in carrying out his orders. Through these actions, Xi has joined not only the U.S. but also Russia, Israel, Syria, and India in mobilizing the War on Terror to exploit and dominate Muslims. In this sense, “China sometimes appears as a distorted mirror image of Trump’s America.” Indeed, Xiism seeks not to change the world, but rather, to maximize China’s position in the world as it is.31
In We Uyghurs Have No Say, Tohti warns of the dangers of “ethnonationalist totalitarianism” in China, openly identifies the Han-Chinese chauvinism encouraged by the CCP as an obstacle to inter-ethnic harmony in Xinjiang, and calls on Han people to “reflect on their own nationalist and fascist attitudes.” Without ignoring ethnic nationalism, extremist movements, or terrorism among Uyghurs, Tohti insightfully identifies how the CCP’s dismissal of minorities’ right to autonomy will lead inevitably either to forcible assimilation or to the intensification of separatist sentiments. As an alternative to both, Tohti yearns for the transformation of China into a democracy that respects human rights and Uyghur self-rule.32
Anti-Semitism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Politics of Unreason
In his chapter for ¡No Pasarán!, Benjamin Case analyzes Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and the far-right today. Case reminds us that, before turning to “Imperialism” and “Totalitarianism,” Arendt begins her study by examining “Antisemitism.” With reference to history and present, Case identifies how anti-Semitism underpins the fascist anti-modernist desire to return to the past (as in MAGA, or “Make America Great Again”); the “socialism of fools,” whereby right-wing forces substitute a crude anti-capitalism with hatred for Jews; and a “nationalist internationalism” that is ironically based on envy of Judaism. Plus, for all the justice of the Palestinian cause, the writer is right to point out that anti-Zionist organizing can sometimes promote and overlap with Judeophobia. This is not to deny worsening tendencies toward Israeli fascism, especially under the current far-right government, much less the Jewish State’s diplomatic normalization with anti-Semitic regimes like the United Arab Emirates. That being said, the left’s discomfort and lack of familiarity with Judaism have often served far-right interests: after all, Mikhail “Bakunin was a canonical anarchist thinker and an outright antisemite” who influenced the proto-Nazi composer Richard Wagner in the nineteenth century, while more recently, unchecked anti-Semitism in the UK’s Labour Party contributed to the Conservative Party’s decisive electoral victory in 2019.33
In The Politics of Unreason (2017), Lars Rensmann contemplates the Frankfurt School theorists’ critique of anti-Semitism as being “linked to a universalistic critique of political and social domination in all its forms […].” In fact, social research performed over the past century has revealed that having anti-Semitic attitudes makes one more likely to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian. Plus, history shows the evidently close link between expressions of Judeophobia and the possibility of genocide against Jews. In this sense, Rensmann upholds the “critical cosmopolitanism” and “positive concept of enlightenment” espoused by the Critical Theorists, who “unconditionally oppos[e] the dehumanization of any group, minority, or Other in global society.”34
Though ostensibly Marxist, the Frankfurt School theorists go beyond Marx through their focus on the Holocaust, which leads them to conclude that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of domination.” From this dynamic, the Critical Theorists identify an overriding categorical imperative to avert all future genocides. In sociological terms, the Frankfurt School thinkers are unique, in that they believe anti-Semitism and authoritarianism to not only be encouraged from above, but also be very much driven from below. On this view, the average worker in modern capitalism is “profoundly damaged […] and stultified by universal domination,” such that authoritarianism affects all classes.35
By revisiting Freudian psychoanalysis, Rensmann explains how the Critical Theorists perceive close ties among the imposition of labor and the loss of freedom, mental-sexual frustration, political powerlessness, violence, and the acceptance of existing power structures, as symbolized by the father-figure or superego. Given that capitalism “structurally den[ies] the pleasure principle and enforc[es] the primacy of the repressive reality,” the life-drive known as Eros is attenuated, to the benefit of the death-drive, Thanatos. As Sigmund Freud and his Frankfurt School-affiliated critic Erich Fromm understood, capitalist society encourages the two poles of sadomasochism: that is, authoritarian aggression and submission. By weakening the ego and/or breaking the spirits of children, parents, teachers, and bosses train future generations to surrender themselves and accept the plans of those in power. Bourgeois coldness, anomie, and lovelessness lead to the redirection of erotic energy toward labor and authority, thus reproducing a vicious cycle, whereby social hierarchy perpetuates aggression, and vice versa.36
Following the Critical Theorist Adorno, Rensmann suggests that authoritarians turn their frustration against outgroups, non-conformists, and minorities like Jews, rather than the authorities, whom they follow and obey. Though they forsake individuality, authoritarians are compensated via “narcissistic uplift” by the small part they play in a larger machine. This goes even for the “rebellious conformists,” like Lyons’ conception of far-rightists, who may seek to overthrow the existing authorities, only to establish new ones. Uniting right and left-wing authoritarians, this category would also include conspiratorial anti-Semites, who demonize Jews rather than question capitalism and social domination, starting from the “socialism of fools” and hatred of self and other.37
Critical Theory warns us that fascism and murderous anti-Semitism can be unleashed when social groups are stressed, agitated, paranoid, dominated by instrumental reason, and lacking a theory of liberation. In this vein, the politics of unreason—crystallized in Trumpism, the global right-wing resurgence, and widespread ignorance of Nazi crimes—represents a specter of “anti-civilizational revolt” that threatens “democracy […] in our time.” Just as the concept of “secondary anti-Semitism,” whether expressed in Holocaust denialism or outright sympathy for fascism, constitutes a Freudian return of the repressed, so “Nationalism Socialism lives on,” and “Hitler survives.”38
Authoritarian Illness
Luke Cooper’s Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy underscores ongoing socio-political struggles between “democratic internationalism” and “authoritarian protectionism”—the latter being another term for conservative or capitalist authoritarianism, having little to do with economic protectionism. Authoritarian protectionism is an outgrowth of the authoritarian individualism promoted during the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980’s. Its proponents reject pluralism and democracy, just as they reject the progressive social changes that have taken place in recent decades. Their aggressive racism, nationalism, and quest for autocratic rule not only inflame far-right and fascist movements—as through viral contagion and mass-psychosis—but also represent significant obstacles to global cooperation for confronting problems like global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic.39
In his book, Cooper rightly focuses on the role of path dependence in facilitating the greatest ills plaguing global society: namely, the insurgent far right, consolidating authoritarianism, global warming, and COVID-19. In other words, the author stresses that past choices have deeply influenced the onset of these socio-political ills, hence also limiting our options for effective resistance. The specter of climate breakdown probably illustrates this dynamic better than anything else. That being said, Cooper’s framing of authoritarian contagion refers dialectically both to threats (replication, spread, colonization) and solutions (infection control). As healthcare workers know, there are many different ways to break the chain of infection. Against authoritarians of all kinds, a radical politics of survival emphasizes internationalism, justice, democracy, cooperation, ecological transition, redistribution, inclusion, and pluralism.40
Critical Theory and Anti-Fascism
In The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse (2022), Charles Reitz focuses on the writings and activism of this Critical Theorist—who, being “very interested in council communism” and a principled opponent of the Vietnam War, was perhaps the most radical of them all—with an eye toward “negat[ing] neofascism definitively,” and aiding “in the establishment, through a global ecosocialist rising, of a culture of partnership power.” Reitz seeks the convergence of the environmental and labor movements to build a cooperative commonwealth that would implement the radical rather than minimum goals of socialism. He applies Marcusean theory to dissect U.S.-American traditionalism, counter-revolutionary authoritarianism, racism, and imperialism, plus Trump and his ilk.41
Reitz’s argument revolves centrally around Marcuse’s 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” which the author identifies as “a product of [Marcuse’s] critique of German fascism and […] genocide.” In this polemical piece, the late Critical Theorist denounces the “pure tolerance” observed in bourgeois society, which considers fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism acceptable. Despite the fact that free-speech absolutism effectively “protects hate speech and facilitate[s] hate crimes,” especially in the USA, it must not be tolerated! In this sense, “Repressive Tolerance” represents an important part of the Marcusean “Great Refusal” of domination and the struggle for collective liberation. Reitz even praises my elucidation of this essay in Eros and Revolution (2016/2018) as a clarion call for revolutionary suppression of fascism from below, akin to the anarchist CNT-FAI’s fateful July 1936 uprising, which blocked Franco’s attempted coup d’etat—at least, temporarily.42
Nevertheless, when commenting on Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, Reitz acknowledges its “pronounced brutality against civilians” and total lack of legitimacy, but he insists that “Russia’s war has not emerged from nothing.” He cites an April 2022 international statement signed by groups in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, including the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, which wrongly identifies the “main culprit” of Putin’s assault as “U.S. imperialism.” Rather than critique Russian chauvinism or focus on Ukrainians—beyond citing attacks on Kyiv and the ruins of Mariupol in passing—the author expresses concern about a supposed “war [by the West] against Russia for Ukraine” involving a “new McCarthyism that will try to silence U.S. antiwar dissent.”43 In light of the daily torrent of Russian atrocities in Ukraine over the past year-plus, such framing may conflict with Marcusean principles of “active genocide prevention.”44
Russia’s War on Ukraine
The stricken Russian missile cruiser Moskva, flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, prior to sinking on April 14, 2022 (Rex/Shutterstock)
Undoubtedly, one of the most important fronts in the global anti-fascist struggle over the past year has been Ukraine, following Russia’s full-scale invasion, as ordered by Putin in February 2022. Guardian editor Julian Borger observed in late January 2023 that “[t]he Bosnian war death toll of 100,000 has most probably already been surpassed” on both sides over the past year. Recalling the fate of Aleppo in 2016, Russia has killed over 25,000 civilians in the city of Mariupol during this time, according to Ukrainian officials. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is evident that Putin’s megalomania and paranoia underpins this genocidal aggression, which has involved the desolation of entire cities, the direct targeting of civilians, rampant sexual violence, and the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia.45
While the German government and public have changed their minds about the transfer of heavy weapons to Ukraine with time, presumably in light of Putin’s outrageous war crimes, a majority of Germans still believes the West should encourage the embattled Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to accept “peace negotiations”—despite that these would likely take place on Putin’s terms. However, the majority of Ukrainians themselves reject the idea of conceding territories occupied by Russia in exchange for a cease-fire. Rather, they seek to repel the invaders and liberate these territories. Actually, in support of such defiance, in January 2023, Germany, the U.S., and the UK took the unprecedented step of greenlighting the transfer to Ukraine of not only over a hundred armored infantry fighting vehicles, but also dozens of main battle tanks from the Leopard, Abrams, and Challenger classes. Now that Germany has authorized re-export of the Leopards, other countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—such as Poland, Spain, and Norway—plan to send more.
Even so, here in the U.S., Republican extremists in Congress and pseudo-anti-imperialist groups like the GrayZone, Code Pink, and the International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America have come together to denounce the Biden administration’s policy of strong military, political, and financial support for Ukraine. They grumble about costs, focus on the risks of U.S. policy escalating toward nuclear war, and call for compromises with Russia. At the same time, these conservatives, authoritarian rebels, and neo-Stalinists—being conformists who are performing non-conformism—do not criticize Putin’s use of nuclear blackmail to seize Ukrainian territory and commit horrendous war crimes. In contrast, the Russian Socialist Movement recognizes that a victory for Putin in Ukraine would would merely set the stage for “new military and political catastrophes” across the globe. Likewise, the Japanese Communist Party has condemned the Russian dictator’s open threats to use nuclear weapons. In light of the risk that Putin’s assault on Ukraine could inspire Xi Jinping to attack Taiwan, leading to a Third World War between China-Russia-North Korea and the USA-NATO-Japan, the Japan Revolutionary Communist League calls on workers everywhere to resist the return of Stalinist terror in Ukraine, and “stir up a storm of antiwar struggle in every corner of the world to crush Putin’s war!”46
Conclusion
Returning to the question posed by al-Shami and Meckfessel in ¡No Pasarán!, we conclude that anti-fascist internationalism requires us to take a universally critical attitude toward authoritarianism, wherever it may appear. We must oppose the “kinship” that Gilroy sees “among all supremacist regimes […].”47 Thus, global anti-authoritarianism urgently demands the rejection of fascist oppression, Western or non-Western, “brown” or “red,” whether wielded at present, in the past, or in the future. So let us proclaim, “Down with Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin! Down with Assad, Putin, Xi, and Modi! Russia, Out of Ukraine! Trump, Never Again!”
In closing, when dealing with fascists, we should keep in mind the failures of the 1938 Munich Agreement on the one hand, and, on the other, the lessons of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”; the struggles of Haitian revolutionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of Spanish and Austrian workers in the late 1930’s; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and the Ukrainian resistance: namely, that appeasement fails, and that direct confrontation with the aggressor is typically necessary. This does not mean that appeals to the rule of law; the use of legal authority; or the spread of information in settings with or without freedom of speech, the press, and/or assembly have no place in the fight against racism, hate speech, anti-Semitism, and violent authoritarianism.48 As part of a diversity of tactics for collective liberation, they arguably do.
Ultimately, though, the consensus from the authors reviewed here is that the anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian causes require profound socio-economic and political changes at all levels of global society. Some specialists in psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, like Marcuse, Rensmann, and Reitz, stress the mental and emotional dimensions of capitalist and fascist aggression. Lyons correctly emphasizes how the protean far-right can both serve and oppose the State and elite. Arendt, Hope, Bento, Ramnath, Case, and Tohti illuminate the intimate and multifaceted ties between racism and fascism. Cooper defies authoritarian contagion with a radical politics of survival. Al-Shami, Meckfessel, Rensmann, and Tohti warn us wisely about the pseudo-anti-imperialists and rebellious conformists who act like the “running dogs” of such non-Western autocracies as Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.49
The question is, can we build a worldwide anti-fascist movement to reconstruct global society before it is too late? Our very future depends on it.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso.
Al-Shami, Leila and Shon Meckfessel 2022. “Why Does the US Far Right Love Bashar al-Assad?” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif.: AK Press. 192–209.
Arendt, Hannah 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt.
Bento, Mike 2022. “Five Hundred Years of Fascism.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif.: AK Press. 312–330.
Cooper, Luke 2021. Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Davis, Angela 1974. An Autobiography. New York: Random House.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Executive Committee for the 60th International Antiwar Assembly 2022. “Working people all over the world, unite to crush Putin’s war!” Japan Revolutionary Communist League. Available online: http://www.jrcl.org/english/e-AG2022.html [insecure link]. Accessed 28 January 2023.
Finkelstein, Norman G. and Ruth Bettina Birn 1998. A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Gilroy, Paul 2000. “Black Fascism.” Transition 81/82. 70–91.
Gregor, A. James 2006. The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hensman, Rohini 2018. Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Hope, Jeanelle K. 2022. “The Black Antifascist Tradition: A Primer.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif.: AK Press. 63–87.
Lyons, Matthew N. 2022. “Three Way Fight Politics and the US Far Right.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif.: AK Press. 20–41.
Ramnath, Maia 2022. “The Other Aryan Supremacy: Fighting Hindu Fascism in the South Asian Diaspora.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif.: AK Press. 210–57.
Reitz, Charles 2022. The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse. Wakefield, Québec: Daraja Press.
Rensmann, Lars 2017. The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Thum, Rian 2022. “Preface: Ilham Tohti and the Uyghurs.” We Uyghurs Have No Say. Trans. Yaxue Cao et al. London: Verso. Vii-xvii.
Tohti, Ilham 2022. We Uyghurs Have No Say. Trans. Yaxue Cao et al. London: Verso.
Zachariah, Benjamin 2021. “Debate: Decolonising Fascist Studies.” Fascism 010. 339–43.
These are my comments, presented on October 9, 2021, at the Ninth Biennial International Herbert Marcuse conference, on the panel “Marcusean Politics Today.” My co-panelists were Shon Meckfessel and Rocío Lopez.
In Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (1954), the sociologists Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills observe that, “from a psychological point of view, the crux of the problem of power rests in understanding the origin, constitution, and maintenance of voluntary obedience.” They add that “Authority, or legitimated power, involves voluntary obedience based on some idea which the obedient holds of the powerful or of his position” (Gerth and Mills 194-5). Indeed, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577), Étienne de la Boetie came to much the same conclusion: namely, that authority persists because we allow it to. Although the reproduction of hierarchy under capitalism is not so simple as that, considering the threats of unemployment, imprisonment, starvation, and assassination for those who rebel, there is something to Jean-Paul Sartre’s comment about a kind of “complicity between the oppressor and the oppressed” (Sartre 338).
In turn, the models of sexual sadomasochism and socio-political authoritarianism developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jessica Benjamin, and Lynn Chancer highlight the psychodynamic dimensions of erotic frustration and gender and class oppression. In other words, under generalized relations of dependence on capital and male authority, the power of the boss, man, sadist, and/or ‘top’ is ultimately derived from the psychological self-subordination of the worker, woman, masochist, and/or ‘bottom.’ In this sense, the specter of revolt can function as a destituent power that reverberates throughout society, as we have seen on many occasions in history, up to and including the present.
At the same time, not all revolt is emancipatory, and “there is no theory of subversion that cannot also serve the cause of oppression” (Rancière xvii). In Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse controversially defends G. W. F. Hegel’s criticism of the “pseudo-democratic” opponents of the post-Napoleonic Restoration régime, likening them—in their xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and German nationalism—to precursors of the Nazis (Marcuse 1999: 179-81).1 Along similar lines, Ze’ev Sternhell sees the fascist cultural and political revolt against Enlightenment values like humanism and rationalism not as anomalous to European history, but rather, as integral to it (Sternhell 3, 250-1). The anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker likewise saw in fascism a “reaction to progress […] rooted in German history but concerning the whole of Europe” (Bernardini 9). Unfortunately, as was confirmed not only by the descent of the Russian Revolution into a Stalinist nightmare, but also by the collaboration of revolutionary syndicalists in the birth of national socialism, the phenomenon of the “leftist right,” or what Jürgen Habermas termed a “left fascism,” certainly exists (Rancière 72; Gandesha). Both in the past, as in the present, we see “discourse[s] of order composed in the vocabulary of subversion” (Rancière 116). In this sense, the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov was right to accuse Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the “Father of Anarchy,” of having combined “extreme Radicalism of mind with extreme Conservatism of mind” (Plechanoff 57, 63). Along similar lines, the neo-Stalinism of the GrayZone bloggers and the Trumpists’ coup attempt at the Capitol in January 2021 are arguably just two sides of the same coin.
Thus, in this presentation, I will analyze the ‘reactionary rebellion’ of the revolutionary French syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847-1922), follower of Proudhon and mentor to Benito Mussolini, the first Fascist leader, whose 1922 March on Rome animated Adolf Hitler’s failed “beer hall putsch” (1923). I will also explore the bureaucratic anti-humanism of Louis Althusser (1918-1990), who sided with his Party (the French Communist, or PCF) in rejecting the May 1968 uprising. I will then conclude with an analysis of national-socialist currents among ‘anti-imperialists’ today, and offer some reconstructive, anti-authoritarian ideas for anarcho-syndicalists and critical theorists going forward.
Georges Sorel’s National Revolution
Perhaps ironically, George Sorel—who infamously synthesized revolutionary syndicalism with ultra-nationalism to inspire Fascism—shared some concerns with the anti-fascist Marxists of the Institute for Social Research, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School theorists. They commonly focused on symbols, emotions, and socio-political psychology in their respective intellectual projects, although admittedly, for vastly different reasons: Sorel sought to “mobilize the masses and to change the world” by annihilating bourgeois society while upholding the authority principle and the place of “revolutionary ‘élites,’” whereas the critical theorists aimed at a non-repressive, anti-authoritarian transformation of global society (Marcuse 2008: 105; Sternhell 59). Across different generations, both the Frankfurters and the Sorelians worried that the working classes of advanced-industrial societies had been integrated into capitalism. Sorel despaired that the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) was more interested in reform than revolution, and Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man (1964) under the impression that workers in the U.S. would not rise up against capitalism (Sternhell 96). In the prologue to Negative Dialectics(1970), Theodor W. Adorno laments that “Philosophy […] remains alive, because the moment of its realization was missed,” given that “the transformation of the world failed.” Along similar lines, Sorel and Walter Benjamin shared a belief in the heroic potential of pessimism.
Of course, neither Adorno nor Marcuse (much less Benjamin) turned, as Sorel and Martin Heidegger did, to national socialism as a “new revolutionary path” (Sternhell 25, 123). Rather, as German-Jewish Marxists, they were forced to flee Nazi Germany and relocate to New York as refugees. After scaling the Pyrenees Mountains in late September 1940, Benjamin poignantly lost his life in the Spanish border town of Portbou, where he overdosed on morphine rather than be deported by Franco’s guards to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy régime. In the U.S., their newfound home, the surviving Frankfurt School theorists continued their principled anti-authoritarian analysis of society, rather than betray the cause, as Sorel so egregiously did.
According to Sternhell’s account in The Birth of Fascist Ideology (1989), fascism can be interpreted as a revolt against the principles of the Enlightenment (3). Certainly, this thesis can explain Heidegger’s own attraction to, and promotion of, Nazism. Like his intellectual mentor Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger sought to demolish the “post-1789 moral-political dispensation [and] replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation” (Beiner). In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse analyzes the Counter-Enlightenment philosophers who rejected German Idealism and inspired Nazism. In this sense, he highlights F. J. Stahl (1802-1861), who affirmed anti-rationalism, repudiated natural law, and sought to replace the category of reason with obedience (Marcuse 1999: 360-74). Likewise Sorel: “a horror of the Enlightenment [was] basic to his thinking” (Sternhell 69). Indeed, this devout Catholic had no truck with the anti-clerical cause. As a white supremacist, Sorel condemned what he saw as the Jacobins’ “recklessness” for “abruptly abolishing slavery in the colonies’”—particularly, in Haiti (Abromeit 396). Many of his followers encouraged Italy’s invasions of Libya (1911) and Ethiopia (1936) as “labor imperialist” projects. Like his protégé and fellow revolutionary syndicalist Mussolini, Sorel found Nietzsche’s ideas attractive, especially the philosopher’s contempt for “English ideas,” liberalism, and bourgeois society—and presumably, as well, the Nietzschean affirmation of slavery (Beiner; Sternhell 101, 110, 126, 196, 200). Sorel attacked the idealist tradition while hailing “proletarian ‘violence’” as a new form of authority (Marcuse 2008: 104).
Like Stahl, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Sorel rejected rationalism, humanism, and natural law. His infamous “revision” of Marxism involved advocacy of the destruction of liberal democracy and parliamentary socialism through class struggle. Paradoxically, like Proudhon, Sorel “refused to touch private property and […] believed neither in equality nor in social justice […].” In reality, this “antidemocratic socialis[t]” envisioned the creation of a “producers’ civilization,” which would effectively function as a “revolutionary capitalism—[or] a capitalism of producers.” In this vein, the Sorelians “had nothing to put in place of capitalism and they did not conceive of a postcapitalist era.” As such, it is not hard to see how such a vision of stripping away liberal norms while retaining the capitalist mode of production could morph into Mussolini’s class-collaborationist, corporatist strategy (Sternhell 22, 28-9, 33, 37, 46-50, 69, 75, 80-2, 91, 117).
In this sense, the birthplace of fascism was neither Italy nor Germany, but rather, France. Though Mussolini would not seize power until 1922, on Sternhell’s account, all the requisite conditions for the propagation of the fascist ideal were in place before the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). In the years after the publication of his Reflections on Violence (1908), a volume that exhorted the proletariat to wield violence to annihilate the bourgeoisie, Sorel abandoned socialism in favor of ultra-nationalism and the “conservative revolution.” In turn, Sorel inspired the founding of the national-syndicalist Cercle Proudhon in late 1911 as a clearing house for “nationalists and leftist anti-democrats.” The futurists and Sorelians in this Cercle highlighted Proudhon’s defense of private property, militarism, traditionalism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. As champions of anti-rationalism, anti-humanism, pessimism, a “revolutionary” hatred of democracy, and fidelity to Sorel’s masculinist cult of violence, these left-right syncretists proclaimed their ideal “the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution” (Sternhell 4, 7, 27-9, 69, 75, 78, 80, 86, 90, 124, 130). As Marcuse might say, the Sorelians failed to question, much less overcome, technical reason; instead, they inspired Mussolini and Hitler to build on Sorel’s vision of a future wherein the “cult of energy” and “authority would emerge victorious all along the line” (Sternhell 24-7, 129, 168, 236-7).
Crucially, Sternhell distinguishes between the theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism and anarchists. For Sorel and his followers, “the principle of authority was never in question.” In fact, “Sorelism detested anarchism,” and the master’s right-hand man, Édouard Berth, “wrote that ‘a real abyss’ divided the ideas of the syndicalists from those of the anarchists.” Paradoxically, the Sorelians opposed the concept of self-management, whether individual or collective; effectively, they proposed a hierarchical and productivist society run by syndicates (Sternhell 31, 103-104, 127, 218-223). Ultimately, these revolutionary unionists were just used by the Fascists to seize power. After all, conceptually speaking, national syndicalism and corporatism utterly contradict the cause of worker autonomy. As we know from Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), the Nazi regime was run in the interests of the industrialists, the bureaucracy, the military leaders, and the National Socialist Party (Neumann). Accordingly, Sternhell is right to conclude that fascists’ use of leftist discourse always has “’rightist’ results” (211), just as Rocker is right to denounce Stalinism and Fascism as totalitarian ideologies that “both grew on the same tree” (Bernardini 7).
Even so, the case of Sorel is a disturbing one, considering how it illuminates the overlap between left and right, which are categories that are often considered to be mutually exclusive. How can it be that Jacques Rancière describes Sorel (perhaps unfairly) as an anarcho-syndicalist, that Mussolini and the Sorelian George Valois had had anarchist sympathies before embracing national socialism, and that so many Italian revolutionary syndicalists became Fascists? (Rancière 61; Sternhell 96, 143) In reality, many leftists and fascists commonly emphasize direct action, energy, violence, heroism, and sacrifice, while championing the will to power and conquest and critiquing “moralism” (Sternhell 29, 176-9). Mussolini and the Nazis admired Bolshevik authoritarianism, and Stalin trusted and allied with Hitler—rather irrationally, it turns out (Arendt 308-9; Bernardini). Part of the appeal of Sorelianism to syndicalists and nationalists alike was (and remains) its claim that both groups share(d) common enemies in liberalism and parliamentarism. Especially in the wake of postmodernism, many self-proclaimed leftists share a reactionary commitment to anti-universalism (Sternhell 163, 250-1). Whether a century ago or now, it is apparent that Sorelians, neo-Stalinists, and national socialists merely seek the worst of all possible worlds: that is, capitalism without any rights at all (Hensman).
Althusser’s Lesson
In Althusser’s Lesson (1974), the French philosopher Jacques Rancière takes his former professor to task for siding with the Communist Party of France (PCF), which opposed the revolutionary student movement of May 1968 as “petit bourgeois.” In regurgitating the Party line, Althusser effectively defended the division between mental and manual labor, privileging the former over the latter, while affirming the “very model prescribed by the philosophy of educators: enlightened despotism.” (In contrast, Sartre supported May 1968.) Besides Althusser’s disgrace, Rancière’s volume is focused “on the much broader logic by which subversive thoughts are recuperated for the service of order” (Rancière xvi, 11, 19, 54).
In this vein, Rancière identifies Althusserianism as a discourse of order wrapped up “in the language of leftism.” He traces its origin to “the desire to combat the revisionist tendencies that had seeped into philosophy following the Twentieth Congress” of 1956, when Nikita Khrushchëv denounced the crimes of Stalin, his then-deceased predecessor. In other words, Althusser followed Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in their questionable defense of Stalin, announced during the Sino-Soviet split in the post-1956 context. Broadly speaking, for Rancière, Althusser’s career amounted to the “fight of a ‘communist philosopher’ against that which threatens both the authority of his Party and of his philosophy: [namely,] Cultural Revolution on a global scale.” Both Althusser and the PCF leadership were anxious about the discovery of Marx’s Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which so moved Fromm, Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and others, because they feared the creation of a “political authority other than the Party.” Accordingly, Althusser maligned these pieces as having been written during Marx’s “petit bourgeois” as opposed to “proletarian” communist phase—despite the fact that this distinction is entirely arbitrary. In terms of theory, Althusser insisted that “Marxism is a[n] anti-humanism,” proposing instead that humanism is “bourgeois idealism,” while championing Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies through his promotion of “an unofficial version of Stalinism” (Rancière xx, 9, 21, 23, 33, 72, 78-9, 83, 113, 116).
Indeed, by the time the May 1968 uprising began with student revolt, Althusser had long given up on any ideas he may have had about questioning and dissolving State power, factory despotism, or wage labor. His attacks on the syndicalist left, and his disgrace over May 1968, speak for themselves. Some of the reconstructive proposals that Rancière considers in closing are ideas about proletarian humanism, self-management, and the independence of labor leading to the autonomy of producers and “a world [re]made for and by the labour community.” At its best, society would operate as a network of cooperatives “which impos[e their] own rhythm on the work [through] non-hierarchical organization” and the democratic recognition of human equality (Rancière 37, 89-90, 93, 108, 117; May).
Conclusion: National Socialism, ‘Anti-Imperialism,’ and Anarcho-Syndicalism
Returning to the attempted Capitol putsch of 2021, we see that this disturbing neo-fascist moment united hyper-masculinity, white-male rage, anddirect action with anti-parliamentarian and anti-democratic politics. As Eric Alterman describes, “Trumpism’s release of suppressed sexual and aggressive drives is a far cry from [what Marcuse termed Eros]. Rather, it represents what Marcuse called the ‘political utilization of sex’ and aggression to reinforce social domination” (Alterman). That being said, this moribund marriage of opportunism with authoritarianism has not been limited in recent years to the far right. In the wake of the rise of self-described ‘leftist’ streamers and ‘anti-imperialist’ bloggers who claim independence from mainstream media while reproducing their brand competitiveness and associated ‘spins’ on reality, many neophyte ‘socialist celebrities’ have profited from “preach[ing] a contempt for democracy and parliamentarism,” as revolutionary syndicalists and ultra-nationalists did a century ago (Sternhell 108, 153).
Along these very same lines, the political comedian Jimmy Dore bases his appeal in a call for the left and the right to “join forces” against “the Establishment.” Likewise, the GrayZone conspiracy theorists deny the existence of concentration camps for Uyghurs and other ethno-religious minorities that are maintained by the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang. Appallingly, one of GrayZone’s main shticks is to deny Bashar al-Assad’s responsibility for hundreds of chemical-weapons attacks carried out against insurgents and civilian communities alike in Syria over the past decade. We shouldn’t, therefore, be surprised that Dore and GrayZone have now switched to promoting disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, and agitating in favor of the use of ivermectin to treat COVID.
Rancière mentions the case of Pierre Daix (1922-2014), a journalist who first “denied the existence of labour camps in the Soviet Union [in 1949]; he never convinced anybody,” and then he resigned from the PCF in 1974, after having engaged with Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago (1973) (Rancière 107). Given the profit and self-promotion involved, we cannot expect the GrayZone editors to argue in good faith about history or current events, much less renounce their absurd positions. The problem is that they do seem to convince their audiences, who admittedly may already be predisposed to aggressive, delusional, and sadistic thought-patterns and behaviors. Like Althusser over May 1968, ‘anti-imperialist’ authoritarians—ostensibly on the left—have built up their brands by denying the existence of the Syrian Revolution over the past decade on the one hand, and covering up the egregious atrocities carried out by the counter-revolutionary axis on the other: that is, Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. With nearly a million Syrians murdered, and millions more displaced internally and across borders, the “line” of GrayZone and its sympathizers—of allying with the executioners—is a fundamental violation of leftist and Enlightenment principles around internationalism, humanism, and egalitarianism. In short, this ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse is merely another discourse of order and a “consecration of the [status quo] in the language of revolution” (Rancière 124).
Around Syria, the Trump regime, and COVID-19, we have seen a clear convergence between Stalinists and fascists who seek to marry revolution with tradition by advancing anti-rationalism, anti-humanism, and a hatred of democracy (Stites 250; Sternhell 240-1). The risk is that contrarian bloggers and streamers in touch with these currents are implicitly and paradoxically promoting neo-Nazism by espousing “an authoritarian and corporatist national revolution based on an ‘anticapitalist’ alliance” (Sternhell 248). Though this risk may seem exaggerated, the experience of four years of Trump, plus the resentment that persists over his electoral loss, show us just how much support the Counter-Enlightenment continues to enjoy.
Within this struggle, in the hopes of avoiding contributing to a reinvigorated fascism in our time, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists should restate our opposition to private property, and our universal support for worker and community self-control of the economy and polity. Plus, we should revisit implicit or explicit futurism, anti-rationalism, and anti-humanism in the movement, and in our history, plus reconsider to what extent sharing a Nietzschean, Heideggerian, or Sorelian critique of liberal democracy is helpful. Furthermore, the cause of worker autonomy, which is realistically the only means of ensuring the preconditions for collective liberation and protection of the Earth from climate destruction, might greatly be assisted by integrating the insights from Critical Theory about the psychological dimensions of overcoming hierarchy, which ultimately is based on voluntary obedience, into labor organizing. Therefore, I conclude: anarcho-syndicalists and critical theorists, unite!
Works Cited
Abromeit, John. “Transformations of Producerist Populism in Western Europe.” Transformations ofPopulism in Europe, the United States and Latin America: History, Theories and Recent Tendencies. Ed. John Abromeit. Unpublished manuscript. 367-413.
Arendt, Hannah 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt.
Beiner, Ronald 2021. “Dangerous Minds in Dangerous Times.” Thesis Eleven, vol. 163, no. 1. 29-42. doi:10.1177/07255136211005989.
Bernardini, David 2021. “A different antifascism. An analysis of the Rise of Nazism as seen by anarchists during the Weimar period.” History of European Ideas. DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2021.1963629.
Gandesha, Samir 2019. “The “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered: the Phantom of ‘Left Fascism.’” American Journal of Psychoanalysis. 79(4): 601-624. doi: 10.1057/s11231-019-09227-w. PMID: 31745203.
Hensman, Rohini 2018. Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Marcuse, Herbert 1999. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
— 2008. A Study on Authority. Trans. Joris de Bres. London: Verso.
May, Todd 2008. The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Neumann, Franz 1942. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. London: Victor Gollancz.
Plechanoff, George 2014. Anarchism and Socialism. Trans. Eleanor Marx. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace.
Rancière, Jacques 2017. Althusser’s Lesson. Trans. Emiliano Battista. London: Bloomsbury.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1983. Cahiers pour une morale. Paris: Gallimard.
Sternhell, Ze’ev 1994. The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution. Trans. David Maisel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1Marcuse comments: “Hegel wrote his Philosophy of Right as a defense of the state against this pseudo-democratic ideology, in which he saw a more serious threat to freedom than in the continued rule of the vested authorities” (1999: 180).
In terms of the red-brown axis/alliance, otherwise known as the phenomenon of pseudo anti-imperialism, some notable developments have transpired in the past few days.
First, Matthew Heimbach, formerly of the Traditionalist Workers’ Party (TWP), a Strasserist neo-Nazi organization, tweeted explicitly in favor of this axis just days ago:
Then, just yesterday, the foreign minister of Nicolás Maduro’s regime, Jorge Arreaza, apparently flew to Damascus to meet with “brother” Bashar al-Assad. Considering this an “immense honor,” the obsequious Arreaza remarks at the “experience, wisdom, and advice for resistance, victory, and Peace [sic!]” he supposedly learned from Assad, reflecting the master-slave relationship this despot demands and expects. This development follows the arrival of an estimated one hundred Russian “military advisers” to Caracas two weeks ago.
We must take this menace very seriously.
These are just a few reasons why no one can afford to ignore the red-brown axis, otherwise known as the pseudo-anti-imperialist phenomenon:
The case of Chris Burnett, an anarchist radio show host who platformed such a notorious Assadist fascist as Vanessa Beeley, is a good example of this disturbing phenomenon;
Verso, “the largest independent radical publishing house in the English speaking world,” is publishing a book by Max Blumenthal, a fascist;
In his “manifesto,” Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mass-murderer of 50 Muslim worshipers, claims affinities with the left/socialism and Trump/the far-right, describing himself as an “eco-fascist”;
Rudolf Bahro, an East German dissident ex-Communist and author of The Alternative in Germany, who was much-praised by the lifelong anti-fascist and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (who died in 1979), drifted increasingly to the “radical” right in the mid-1980’s, even coming to so repugnant a position as to desire the rehabilitation of Hitler in German society, as in the idea of a ‘Green Adolf’: “Is there really no thought more reprehensible than a new 1933? [Referring to Hitler’s year of accession.] But that is precisely what can save us!” (Logik der Rettung [Stuggart and Vienna, 1987], 461). In an interview from 1991, moreover, Bahro declares ominously that, “we will have to have a lot to do with what it was that found expression then [in 1933] and that is seeking another, better expression this time” (Rückkehr: Die In-Welt Krise als Ursprung der Weltzerstörung [Frankfurt: Horizonte Verlag], 24-5 [emphasis added]).
Many Western leftists, in reacting to the ongoing political, economic, and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, have effectively rationalized Maduro’s brutal rule as the “lesser evil” to U.S.-backed Juan Guaidó using the misleading slogan “Hands Off Venezuela,” echoing everyone from Maduro to Russia Today and The Intercept in falsely claiming the events since January 23, 2019, to represent a “coup.”
There is both a local/domestic and regional/global context to this complex phenomenon, which is indissolubly tied to Trump, Putin, and the “legitimization” of conservative-authoritarian populism, white supremacy, and neo-fascism across the globe. There is a serious risk, as these cases show, that Dan Glazebrook’s fears, expressed in the essay “The Politically-Correct Fascism Gaining Ground on the Left” (Counterpunch Magazine, Feb. 2019), are correct: “Given the lack of a social base for genuine socialism (anti-imperialist and internationalist) in the west, leftists can be utilized by fascism without fear. By helping to delegitimize liberal democracy, leftists can inadvertently help lay the basis for fascism…” (p. 24, emphasis added).
Please enjoy the fourth movement of William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony, no. 1,” which I first encountered at a performance this past weekend at the LA Philharmonic during an evening commemorating the Harlem Renaissance.
Undoubtedly, the music is aspirational, highly moving, and utopian, reflecting the historical struggle for emancipation from white supremacy and authoritarianism: “the Not-Yet-Become, towards viable possibilities of the light” (Bloch).
In November 2018, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) took a public stand against resurgent white-supremacist and neo-fascist ideologies by clearly stating that there is no scientific basis for the purported existence of races among human beings. Race and racial hierarchies are instead social constructs. From the main text:
“The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is alarmed to see a societal resurgence of groups rejecting the value of genetic diversity and using discredited or distorted genetic concepts to bolster bogus claims of white supremacy. ASHG denounces this misuse of genetics to feed racist ideologies. In public dialog, our research community should be clear about genetic knowledge related to ancestry and genomic diversity. To that end, ASHG affirms the following:
Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories. Although there are clear observable correlations between variation in the human genome and how individuals identify by race, the study of human genetics challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research, including recent examples.1,2,3,4,6
Most human genetic variation is distributed as a gradient, so distinct boundaries between population groups cannot be accurately assigned. There is considerable genetic overlap among members of different populations. Such patterns of genome variation are explained by patterns of migration and mixing of different populations throughout human history.7In this way, genetics exposes the concept of “racial purity” as scientifically meaningless.
It follows that there can be no genetics-based support for claiming one group as superior to another. Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct. Any attempt to use genetics to rank populations demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics.
ASHG will continue to advance scientific knowledge and debunk genetics-based arguments promoting racial supremacy. ASHG also encourages all society members to be active as citizens in political, policy, and social advocacy organizations that reflect their values. This is a perfect complement to their scientific contributions to this debate through ASHG. […]
Recognizing that the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist, ASHG will focus in the public arena on contributing new fundamental knowledge to the societal dialog about ancestry, supporting greater diversity in research, continuing to engage the field and public to build genetic literacy, and addressing misconceptions of genetics and ancestry.”
In light of the fate of the Syrian Revolution, which has now nearly been crushed entirely by the bloody counter-revolution carried out by Bashar al-Assad together with his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese allies, there has been renewed debate on the global left regarding the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the political implications these carry. Many authoritarians claiming leftism cross-over with the white-supremacist right’s open support for the Assad Regime by denying its crimes and overlooking the (sub)imperialist roles played by Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria, focusing exclusively on the U.S.’s supposed opposition to Assad’s rule.
This tendency is a worrisome development, suggestive as it is of a red-brown alliance (or axis) that is not consistently anti-imperialist or internationalist but rather, only opposed to U.S. imperialism. It also fails analytically to see how the U.S. has increasingly accommodated Assad’s ghastly ‘victory,’ as reflected in Donald Trump’s cutting off of the White Helmets in May and his non-intervention as Assad, Russia, and Iran defeated formerly U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA) units of the Southern Front, reconquering Der’aa, birthplace of the Revolution, and the remainder of the southwest last month. In stark contrast to such approaches, today we will discuss militarism and imperialism from anti-authoritarian and class framework-analyses.
Toward this end, I want to suggest that Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation’s definition of imperialism is apt: from their Point of Unity on Internationalism and Imperialism, “Imperialism is a system where the state and elite classes of some countries use their superior economic and military power to dominate and exploit the people and resources of other countries.”1This brutal concept applies clearly to contemporary and historical global practices which since 1492 primarily Western European and U.S. ruling classes have imposed onto much of the world, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade—this month marks 500 years—to colonial famines, genocide, military occupation, and settler-colonial regimes. Yet, more controversially among many so-called leftists who adhere to a ‘campist analysis,’ whereby the world is split up into competing military blocs,2this concept of imperialism and its related concept of sub-imperialism can also be applied to the contemporary practices of the ruling classes of such societies as Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, otherwise known as the BRICS. According to Rohini Hensman in her new book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (2018), the “pseudo-anti-imperialists” of today can be divided into three categories: tyrants, imperialists, and war criminals; the neo-Stalinists who openly support them; and Orientalist ‘progressives’ who focus exclusively on Western imperialism, to the exclusion of all other considerations, such as the agency of Middle Eastern peoples, as well as the realities of non-Western imperialism & sub-imperialism (47-52). For those to whom the concept may be unfamiliar, sub-imperialism is defined in the Marxist theory of dependency (MTD) as a process whereby a dependent or subordinate country becomes a “regional sub-centre,” unifies “different bourgeois factions by displacing internal contradictions, develops a “specific national and sub-imperialist political-ideological project,” forms and advances monopolies, and simultaneously transfers value to the core-imperialist countries while also exploiting materially and geopolitically weaker countries for the benefit of its bourgeoisie.3
The central military roles played by Putin and the Islamic Republic in rescuing the Assad Regime from defeat in the Syrian Revolution—and, indeed, their joint responsibility for the overall murder of 200,000 civilians and the forcible disappearance of over 80,000 Syrians in this enterprise over the past seven years, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), and as confirmed recently by Assad’s mass-release of death notices for detainees—thus starkly demonstrate pressing cases of imperialism and sub-imperialism on today’s global stage, yet in contrast to the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians just across Syria’s southwest border, it is apparently eminently controversial among U.S./Western neo-Stalinist ‘leftists’ to acknowledge the reactionary, authoritarian, and yes, (sub)imperialist functions served by Vladimir Putin and the Islamic Republic in propping up Assad,4 a neo-fascist who does not just rule over a ‘dictatorial regime’ but rather heads an exterminationist State, as the Syrian communist Yassin al-Hajj Saleh observes, and as the death toll attests to. According to Saleh:
“I do not talk about Syria because I happen to come from this country afflicted with one of the most brutal ruling juntas in the world today, nor because Syria is under multiple occupations while Syrians themselves are scattered around the world. Rather, I speak of Syria because the Syrian genocide is met by a state of global denial, where the left, the right, and the mainstream all compete with one another to avert their eyes and formulate cultural discourses, genocidal themselves, to help them see and feel nothing.”
The Russian Defense Ministry just announced on Wednesday, August 22, that 63,000 soldiers have fought in Syria in the past three years, while in June, Putin announced that Russian troops were “testing and training” in Syria so as to prevent a similar situation arising in Russia proper. (Does this sound to anyone like Dick Cheney talking about Iraq?) Hence, in light of the effective occupation of Syria perpetrated by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other Shi’a militias (e.g. Liwa Fatemiyoun) to prop up the regime, taken together with their attendant contributions to what Saleh calls the Syrian genocide—a counter-insurgent reaction which others have termed ‘democidal’—it is my view, and I believe that of my co-panelists, that several of the struggles against Assad, Putin, and the Islamic Republic of Iran form critical parts of the global anti-imperialist movement which by definition resists militarism and regional and transnational domination and exploitation. If human rights are the “tribunal of history” and their end (or goal) the construction of an ethical and political utopia,5 these regimes, in parallel to Western imperialism, are on the wrong side of history. In accordance with the conclusion of Hensman’s book,democratic movements like the Iranian popular revolts of early 2018; the ongoing Ahwazi mobilizations for socio-ecological justice; those of feminists and political prisoners in all three countries; and Russian Antifa, among others, demand our support and solidarity as socialists. Of course, anti-imperialist forces should continue to oppose established Euro-American imperialism and settler-colonialism—“the main enemy is at home,” as Karl Liebknecht declared in 1915, denouncing what he termed the ‘genocide’ of World War I6—together with the neo-colonial crimes of allied autocracies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen today. Liebknecht’s statement notwithstanding, we must recall that he in no way supported the Tsar or other imperialist rivals of the German State, but the Russian Revolution instead.
Therefore, a truly humanist form of anti-imperialism today cannot exclude the Syrian, Russian, and Iranian regimes from critique and, it is to be hoped, support for organization toward their ultimate demise.7 The atrocity-denialism engaged in by many self-styled ‘progressives’ and ‘leftists’ in the West when it comes to the Assad Regime, as identified by Leila al-Shami and others, is abhorrent. If we really believe as internationalists and egalitarians that each human life has equal dignity and value, we must play no part in it.8
For our own sake and for the sake of the global revolution, too, it would behoove us to examine the actual affinities between the Trump Regime and Putin, which span allegations of collusion or conspiracy during the 2016 election to Trump’s very obvious servility before the former FSB chief at the Helsinki Summit of July 2018, besides Trump’s aforementioned withdrawal of U.S. support for the Syrian rebels, a move that may well have been coordinated with Russia as an affirmation on Trump’s part of Assad’s ghoulish campaign to retake the entire country.
Appendix:
The red-brown axis certainly has its precedents: the historian Marko Attila Hoare has correctly diagnosed several self-described Euro-American ‘anti-imperialists’ as being ‘left-revisionists’ who reject the orthodox Western view that holds Serbian nationalism to be the primary aggressor in the Balkan wars of the 1990’s that led to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians, as reflected in the so-called leftist intellectuals and publications (Noam Chomsky, Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch) who effectively supported the embattled ultra-nationalist Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, for his ‘resistance’ to the US/NATO, thus betraying their campism where we should expect humanist solidarity with those victimized by Serbian expansionism.
Rohini Hensman argues as an alternative to established pseudo-anti-imperialism that we pursue and tell the truth; critique ideologies that delegitimize democracy and promote authoritarianism; reaffirm the morality of resisting oppression and proclaiming solidarity with the victims of violence; place internationalism center-stage; and consider reforms to State sovereignty in light of mass-slaughter and the absence of democracy.
Notes
1This definition differs somewhat from Lenin’s definition of imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism,” whereby the merging of big banks and industry exists inevitably alongside “a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world.” It does not contradict Lenin’s subsequent redefinition in the same text: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination).”
2Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), World Workers’ Party (WWP), World Socialist Website (WSWS), Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, Vanessa Beeley (actually fascist), Seymour Hersh, “Revolutionary Left Radio,” Glenn Greenwald, and others.
3Adrián Sotelo Valencia, Sub-Imperialism Revisited: Dependency Theory in the Thought of Ruy Mauro Marini, trans. Jacob Lagnado(Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2017), 67-8.
4By BRRN’s definition, above; also cf. Rudolf Hilferding, cited in Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”: “European capital can maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces.”
5Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Hart Publishing: Oxford, 2000), 380.
6“International proletarian class struggle against international imperialist genocide is the socialist commandment of the hour.”
8See the conclusions of a lab working for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which confirm use of sarin gas from regime stockpiles in Ghouta (2013), Khan Sheikhoun (2017), and Khan al-Assal (2013). According to OPCW findings, it was chlorine, not sarin, that was used in the chemical attack on Douma, Eastern Ghouta, in April 2018.
As the World Cup gets underway in Russia, we repost this essay by Sam Hamad, an independent Scottish-Egyptian activist and writer, criticizing the Russian State for its war crimes in Syria. Besides supporting Bashar al-Assad—Vladimir Putin recently declared that Russian troops are “testing and training” in Syria—Putin’s regime is very sexually traditionalist, with the result that Russian fascists have threatened LGBTQ+ World Cup fans with violence. Moreover, Russia also recently decriminalized domestic violence. Essay originally appeared in The New Arab
by Sam Hamad
It has become a grizzly routine for me to browse social media and come across pictures of dead Syrian children on my newsfeed. Over the past seven years, from the safety of Edinburgh, I’ve seen severed limbs, charred remains, melting skin and, most recently, the lifeless body of a Syrian child who had been decapitated by a Russian airstrike.
Across all of Europe and around the globe, Russia is launching increasingly bold attackson the already fractured liberal democratic order. This is not hyperbole. This is not ‘Russophobia’.
It was the first country since Nazi Germany to annex part of another European country, when it reacted to the peaceful overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russia puppet president by annexing Crimea, and waging a proxy war against the rest of the country.
This ought to make the heavens darken, so to speak. It ought to arouse so much outrage among us – the privileged – that we fill up the streets and demand this daily murder end.
But it will be met with silence and, most chillingly, indifference. For the violence in Syria, outside of small bursts of international attention usually sparked by chemical weapons atrocities, exists outside the consciousness of most of the world.
Come this Thursday, the genocide in Syria, driven so decisively by Iran and Russia on behalf of Assad’s rump state, will not simply fall further down the rungs of the collective global attention span, but it will be actively normalised.
Putin’s Russia is hosting the FIFA World Cup, which will draw around 4 billion global viewers.
If you thought the silence or indifference or active support that surrounds the Syrian genocide and Russia’s role in it was bad enough, just wait until you get a load of the Russian state’s propaganda assault for the next month. Robbie Williams, the lead performer at the opening ceremony, has said it will be ‘an unforgettable show’, while gushing about how much he loves Russia.
The most obvious point of comparison of the World Cup being held in Putin’s Russia, is Nazi Germany’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Third Reich had Richard Strauss, while Putin’s Russia has ‘a fat dancer from Take That’, or so went the infamous putdown of Williams by Oasis’ Liam Gallagher.
In this sense, one might be tempted to conjure Marx’s famous statement about historic events repeating first as tragedy and then as farce, but there is nothing farcical about the effectiveness of a propaganda coup like hosting the FIFA World Cup, regarding Russia’s fascistic global ambitions.
The silence surrounding Russia’s genocidal intervention in Syria was always a sign that Russian imperialism was winning
The silence surrounding Russia’s genocidal intervention in Syria was always a sign that Russian imperialism was winning, but Russia’s World Cup will lead to a new level of normalisation for its brutally sinister geopolitical agenda.
Imagine the outrage of particularly the global Left, if this was any country other than Russia.
Imagine if the US had held the World Cup during the Iraq war. There would be rightful outrage – campaigns and protests. In fact, think of the rightful indignation when it was announced that Eurovision would be held in Jerusalem, given Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation – or the logic of boycotting nations committing active human rights abuses in general.
Why is this not applied to Russia, which is one of the main participantsin the first genocide of the 21st century and, domestically speaking an egregious violatorof human rights?
Yes, there exists a host of international sanctions that literally have zero effect in terms of shifting Putin’s policy, but what about organic solidarity or opposition to Russia’s genocidal, revanchist imperialist machinations?
The tragic reality is that Russian fascism navigates itself essentially unhindered through an ocean of blood in Syria, while it casts its menacing shadow over European capitals with little to no popular resistance.
In the UK, the reaction to Russia’s chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, the first attack by a foreign country on English soil since the Blitz, targeting a Russian defector, was muted to say the least. Conspiracy theories pumped out by formal and informal Russian propagandists, including one tacitly endorsed by leader of the UK opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, has diluted and obscured the discourse.
Children play football in front of a damaged building in a rebel-held neighbourhood of Daraa, southern Syria, 7 May 2018 [AFP]
In fact, there exists, as has been covered extensively, a very deliberately cultivated distortion, woven through pro-Russia propaganda outlets, where Russia is cast as a victim of western aggression and a bastion of truth against western lies.
Russian fascism navigates itself essentially unhindered through an ocean of blood in Syria
The news of Russian links to funding the Leave campaign are buried away in the minutes of select committees and articles that most people won’t read. Similarly, the Sunday Timesfinding that 6,000 Russian twitter accounts had been mysteriously mobilised to support Corbyn’s Labour at the last UK general election, has scarcely penetrated public consciousness.
Russia has, over the past few decades, not just begun to reassert itself after the humiliating collapse of the Soviet empire, but it is now actively attempting to shape world order in its own image. This is an order of authoritarianism and anti-egalitarianism, being sealed by the genocide in Syria.
It’s in the killing fields of Syria, the devastated urban landscapes of East Ghouta, Aleppo and Homs – annihilated by Russian missiles, artillery shells, white phosphorus munitions and cluster bombs – that Russia is hammering out its new world order.
And it is winning on multiple different fronts. Russia is successfully degrading the mode of ethics that allegedly conditions world order. It is seeking to turn the world into an abode of monsters, of authoritarian tyrants, of which it is something of a vanguard.
Moreover, Russia’s authoritarian order manages to unite left and right-wing forcesin support of its endeavours. Though the comparison between Russia and the rise of European fascism of the 20th century is apt, in reality, there is much less resistance to Russia’s authoritarian drive than there was to historic fascism.
The same social forces that opposed fascism in the 20th century seem likely to support the narratives of Russian imperialism, namely that it provides opposition to US imperialism and the western ‘neoliberal’ economic order. The Left see liberal democracy as ‘bourgeois democracy’ and thus see any chance of weakening it as a good thing, while Russia’s propaganda outlets provide them with numerous platforms.
To the Right, Russia is a bastion of white Christian civilisation against ‘Islamification’ and liberalism; it serves to unravel the egalitarian gains and order of liberal democracy, long hated by the Right.
This is not hyperbole. This is not ‘Russophobia’
Russia’s hosting of the World Cup can only be seen through this context.
In fact, to those of us who oppose authoritarianism, racism, imperialism, homophobia and, most urgently, genocide, it must be seen this way. The fact that this is by and large not the case, is symptomatic of the fact that fascism with a Russian face is triumphing, and there is no coherent resistance to its advance.
The US, its allegedly ‘natural’ counterbalance, is controlled by a president who is potentially in thrall to Putin, while he continues to help Russia’s anti-EU crusade by weakeninghis alleged European allies and forcing them to rely more on Putin’s Russia.
In addition to the political rise of pro-Russia forces, Europe itself has largely gone down the road of counterintuitive appeasement, terrified of escalation that is occurring regardless – the Salisbury attack was a result of Russia’s triumph. It knows that its enemies are capable of nothing, it has balked at their limp response by so-called democrats to its imperialist assault on Ukraine.
It has seen that the world is willing to accommodate and green light genocide rather than risk even a remote confrontation with it, despite its bluff having been successfully called in localised circumstances.
There is unlikely to be any opposition from the compliant or terrified Russian populace. Internal dissent will be and has been crushed. We’ve already seen Mo Salah, a hero to millions, pose with Ramzan Kadyrov, the kleptocratic tyrannical head of the Chechen Republic, under whose watch brutal anti-gay purges have taken place. This is a glimpse of the process of normalisation.
If these basic progressive values can’t be defended, what chance do Syrians have?
This is a world cup filled with Syrian blood. Russia’s effective one-party state makes it impossible to separate this sporting carnival from Putin’s global panoply of PR designed to normalise all its actions, including the Syrian genocide.
Where any criticism exists, from human rights groups and Russia’s victims, it will fall on deaf ears as the world is mesmerised by the tournament.
As Russia continues to murder Syrian children, snuffing out the precious seeds of life and hope in a faraway land, as Russia continues to brazenly erode democracy, the world will have their games, and Putin will have his Olympia.
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Originally publishedon 7 April 2017
In light of the fact that Donald Trump is president, and that his consigliere Steve Bannon has publicly expressed a favorable view of the Italian fascist and SS enthusiast Julius Evola; considering the possibility that the neofascist Marine Le Pen’s Front National could win the 2017 elections in France; and given the explosive violence targeting Muslims, Jews and people of color in the US since Trump’s election, the time is certainly right to read and widely discuss Alexander Reid Ross’s new book, Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).
As the title suggests, Reid Ross is concerned here with the “fascist creep,” which is related to the idea of the “fascist drift,” or the disturbing attraction many 20th-century leftists felt for this new reactionary ideology. Fascists reject mainstream conservatism as decrepit and corrupt (see the contemporary alt-right’s repudiation of the GOP), and while they violently oppose liberalism, socialism and anarchism, they paradoxically wield left-wing notions, such as solidarity and liberation, as part of their ultranationalist schemes for a falsely classless society, which is to be characterized by “natural hierarchy.” Fascism also relies heavily on myth, in the sense that its proponents seek to restore a “golden age” that supposedly existed in the putatively heroic past by means of “national revolution” against the existing liberal-parliamentarian order. This romantic-revolutionary element represents another commonality in the creep between fascism and leftism, considering the nostalgia for the precapitalist “lost paradise” that sometimes drives left-wing passions. In fact, Reid Ross writes that fascists gain ground precisely by deploying “some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism,” opportunistically inverting the internationalist goals of socialism. Clearly, fascists and leftists differ principally on the question of egalitarianism, with the latter defending equality by organizing against capitalism, the state, borders, patriarchy and racism, while the former use these oppressive systems to reproduce inequality, domination and genocide.
As Reid Ross explains, US fascists rely on the “radical” or far right cesspool of authoritarian nativists, white supremacists, conservative “revolutionaries” and neoconservatives to mainstream their views, recruit, gain popularity and ultimately seize power. Indeed, we now confront a nightmarish playing-out of this scenario with Trump’s rise to power. Yet the situation is distinct in Europe, where fascists have drawn heavily from the revolutionary-leftist tradition to advance their aims. In this sense, Against the Fascist Creep is a clear warning to the left.
Fascist Origins
Reid Ross situates the historical origins of the fascist creep in imperialism, white supremacism and ableism, considering the models that prior Euro-American colonialists had handed down to Hitler and Mussolini, as during the “scramble for Africa” and the genocides of Indigenous peoples. Moreover, there was a clear connection between the Nazis’ mass murder of people with disabilities, the Holocaust (otherwise known as the Shoah), and Hitler’s plans to annihilate the Slavs and other non-Aryan peoples after defeating the Soviet Union. Jew-hatred, or anti-Semitism, characterizes fascism from its beginnings through to its Nazi embodiment and the present. Yet challengingly, Reid Ross demonstrates the “crossover” between fascism and revolutionary causes, such as syndicalism and ecology, as well. The latter is seen in the commonalities among Romanticism, völkisch ultranationalism and nature conservation — for both Hitler and his National Socialism devotee Savitri Devi [an Anglo-European who embraced Hinduism] were vegetarians who loved animals, and the German Democratic Ecology Party has promoted Holocaust denial, while Earth First! has at some times in its history bolstered white supremacism through its appeals to Nordic paganism. The overlap between fascism and syndicalism is illuminated by the example of the original fascist creep, Georges Sorel, a revolutionary enthusiast of the “myth” of the general strike, whom Mussolini would declare as “our master,” and who in turn supported Il Duce. Sorel’s followers, founders of the Cercle Proudhon, emphasized this French anti-Semitic anarchist’s anti-parliamentarianism while downplaying Proudhon’s relative egalitarianism, leading to the paradoxical creation of the ultranationalist idea of national syndicalism that partly inspired Italian Fascism. Reid Ross explains that Mussolini sought to integrate syndicalism into a corporate state while repressing the left and projecting an image of societal regeneration.
As is known, the “demonstration effect” of Mussolini’s seizure of power through the October 1922 March on Rome influenced Hitler and the Nazis to declare “national revolution” and lead the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” against the Bavarian government. With Hitler imprisoned following this failed uprising, Gregor and Otto Strasser pushed Nazi ideology toward völkisch national socialism, proposing the mass deportation of Jews, the redistribution of property, and syndicalist integration. Following Hitler’s release, tensions raged between these competing factions — the SA (or Brownshirts) and SS (or Blackshirts) — as the Strassers, Ernst Röhm and the SA increasingly became a liability to the German ruling class, which sought to employ the Nazis against the workers. In 1930, Otto Strasser was expelled from the Nazi Party for supporting strikes, and he went on to found the “Black Front” and “Freedom Front” to undermine Hitler, but this “left faction” was eliminated with the SS’s assassination of Röhm, Gregor Strasser and other SA leaders on the Night of Long Knives in July 1934.
Meanwhile, the German Communist Party (KPD) considered a Nazi takeover preferable to the continuation of the Weimar Republic, and even in some ways worked with Hitler to undermine it, echoing the Stalinist conception that the social-democratic opposition was “social fascist.” Nevertheless, one must not overlook the courageous self-defense efforts of the communists and the social democrats in the Red Front Fighters’ Alliance (RFB) and Antifascist Action (AFA), as well as the Reichsbanner, respectively. The rest, from Hitler’s takeover in January 1933 to World War II and the Shoah, is well known history, though Reid Ross’s observation that Nazism in power served capitalism and tradition bears echoing, as it belies the fascist claim to revolutionism and commitment to workers’ interests. This dynamic is reflected well in the substantial investment and political support afforded to Hitler and Francisco Franco by US corporations.
Post-War Fascism
Unfortunately, the defeat of the Axis would not mark the end of fascist intrigue, as Nazi war criminals were rehabilitated in West Germany and served US imperialism in the Cold War. Evola, Otto Strasser and their followers continued to mobilize after WWII, particularly against NATO’s presence in Europe — so as to “liberate” the continent — and in favor of the “strategy of tension” to strengthen state power, as seen in Italy and Latin America. Strasser’s advocacy of a “third position” beyond capitalism and Stalinism influenced fascist and “national communist” movements in France and Italy, while the Evolian Alain de Benoist developed the theoretical underpinnings of the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”), which opposes equality in favor of apartheid, “difference” and “diversity,” and calls for whites to mobilize pride for their ancestral, pagan past against the ostensible impositions of the Judeo-Christian, liberal-multicultural system.
Transitioning from the Cold War to the present, Reid Ross identifies several continuities between historical and contemporary fascist creep. This plays out in five theaters:
• The “Radical Right”:The non-fascist ethnocentric populism of the far right is crucial in the fascistization process. In the US, this has involved Willis Carto promoting the ideas of global racial apartheid in the Right journal and working with white and Black nationalists to oppose the supposed common enemy of Zionism. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan under David Duke’s leadership, accelerating settler-colonial fantasies about creating a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest, and the emergence of the neo-Nazi “Order” terrorist group represent other important historical examples of the cross-over between the far right and fascism in the US. Moreover, the Patriot and Minutemen movements — allies to Pat Buchanan, the Tea Party and Trump — are strongly tied to the idea of private property, while the collaboration of the “Chicago School” of market fanatics with Augusto Pinochet’s fascism is well known. An admirer of Pinochet and Franco, the rabid anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National, followers of the Nouvelle Droite, represent the French Radical Right, while the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) — which narrowly lost the 2016 presidential elections — has advanced Holocaust denialism from its beginnings.
• The Third Position:Neo-Nazi nostalgia for Strasserism as an alternative to Hitler was diffused in the 1980s through punk music, particularly that of the band Death in June and the general “Rock Against Communism” impetus that arose in response to the “Rock Against Racism” directed at skinheads. Strasserism also informed the White Aryan Resistance’s (WAR) efforts to instigate racial war in the US at this time, particularly in the idea of a “Wolfstadt” to be declared in the Pacific Northwest, as well as Troy Southgate’s concept of “national anarchism,” whereby left and right would unite against the State and create new decentralized societies based on strict racial separation.
• National Bolshevism:Though first suggested by Strasser, the unseemly idea of melding red and brown into “national Bolshevism” took off in Russia and Germany following the collapse of the USSR. The Evolian Alexander Dugin — a major ally of Vladimir Putin’s — hailed the “radically revolutionary and consistent fascist fascism” surging in post-Soviet Russia as ultranationalists mercilessly attacked foreigners in the streets and Boris Yeltsin and Putin leveled Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Fascists from all over Europe joined either side in the Yugoslavian Civil War as well. More recently, Dugin has promoted his “fourth political theory” — an amalgam of fascism, irrationalism and traditionalism — by uniting “anti-imperialists” with “national conservatives.”
• Fascists of the Third Millennium:The 1990s and early 2000s saw neofascist groups continue creeping by infiltrating the anti-globalization, ecology, animal rights and anarchist movements, attempting to reorient them into pro-fascist directions. This phenomenon of entryism has typified the national-anarchist, “pan-secessionist” and “autonomous-nationalist” tendencies (see below). During this time were born Golden Dawn (Greece) and Jobbik (Hungary), while the British National Party (BNP) swelled in popularity; all of these groups follow the Nouvelle Droite and the Third Position.
• Autonomous Nationalism: Perhaps the most bizarre neofascist formation is that of the “autonomous social nationalists,” who mimic their German anarchist predecessors the Autonomen in style and militancy, supporting syndicalism, radical ecology and insurrectional street-fighting tactics against capital and the State — only that they also violently target immigrants, Jews, leftists and Roma, seeking the creation of an “authentic” völkisch future for Germany. Autonomous nationalists have also been active in Bulgaria and Ukraine, particularly during the run-up to the “revolution” that occurred in the latter country in 2014.
Contemporary Fascism and Resistance
In the book’s conclusion, Reid Ross examines several contemporary fascist trends that illustrate the text’s main concerns, including the overlap between the “American Third Position” and the neo-Nazi American Freedom Party vis-à-vis the US libertarian-propertarian movement, the contradictory support and repulsion for Israel expressed by neofascists, the Orientalist impetus for “CounterJihad” and the idea of Occupy Wall Street bringing left and right together against the system. The author also raises the morbidly fascinating tendency of some known white nationalists publicly supporting people of color rebelling against US police as a means of accelerating state collapse. This seemingly contradictory posturing in fact brings up the larger tendency of “pan-secessionism,” which is related to national anarchism, as its proponents seek to support Indigenous revolutionaries, Black militants, white supremacists and radical ecologists in organizing collective secession from the capital-state system. In point of fact, Reid Ross raises the case of Michael Schmidt, a Strasserite third-positionist and formerly well-known syndicalist historian whom the author courageously and rather controversially exposed in September 2015, as typifying these disturbing neoreactionary trends. Reid Ross also rightly identifies the contemporary alt-right’s approach as desiring to deepen the ongoing crisis so that the retrograde ideologies this phenomenon represents can “come out on top,” while knowingly observing — in an echo of Albert Camus — the crossover among post-anarchist nihilism, anti-civilizational deep ecological thought and neoreaction.
Reid Ross’s newest volume is an excellent and disconcerting study of fascism’s origins, development, present and possible futures. Against the Fascist Creep deserves the broadest possible audience. Hopefully, it can help to inspire a new mass movement to resist all authoritarian ideologies, whether emanating from the State or the “autonomous” grassroots. To overcome the severe threat that fascism and neofascism pose to the Earth and its peoples, only mutual aid and cooperation on a vast scale can succeed. We must press forward by struggling militantly against Trumpism, the “radical” right, Third Positionism, “autonomous nationalism” and authoritarian leftism alike. Against these myriad political and philosophical absurdities, let us advance global anti-authoritarian revolution.
The following is the official statement of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa on the controversy that erupted around Michael Schmidt, a South African activist, several months ago. It follows a careful collective discussion process and research and comes several weeks after the last installment in a series of articles claiming to be an expose of Schmidt. As we are also committed to a number of ongoing workshops, activities and publications, our time was limited. It has two main aims: to outline our position on the claims made for, and against, Schmidt, and to respond to a number of false statements that have been made about the ZACF in the course of the developing Schmidt affair.
The statement opens with an executive summary, followed by a much more extensive discussion.
The statement was collectively crafted and issued by the ZACF: www.zabalaza.net
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (DETAILED ANALYSIS FOLLOWS):
1. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF, or “Zabalaza”) is a small anarchist / syndicalist organisation in South Africa, dating back to 2003. It has a long history of militant work and publication, a majority black and working class composition, and connections in neighbouring countries. It was formed on May Day 2003 by independent collectives involved in student and township struggles and in the “new social movements” of the time. In line with its founding documents, the ZACF Constitution and Position Papers, the ZACF opposes all forms of oppression, including racial domination, national oppression, imperialism, the oppression of women and immigrants, and capitalism and the state (http://zabalaza.net/organise/theoretical-positions-of-the-zacf/).
2. We stand for the complete national and class emancipation of the black working class in South Africa through revolutionary struggle, and have a long track record as an organisation that’s political work and social base lie primarily with the black working class and its organisations (see e.g.www.zabalaza.net and www.saasha.net and www.facebook/zabalazanews). The anarchist and syndicalist movement in South Africa is very small, and the ZACF is a substantial and important part of this movement, not a minority strand.
3. In this statement the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) discusses the controversy that has surrounded accusations against former ZACF member Michael Schmidt, by the American journalists Alexander Reid Ross and Joshua Stephens and the America-based publisher AK Press. Schmidt left active work in ZACF in early 2009, and resigned in early 2010. The allegations are that Schmidt was, from at least 2002 to the present, a fascist and racist cadre infiltrating the anarchists – including ZACF. Schmidt argues that he has been misrepresented, that his track record and the evidence are at odds with the claims, and that fake right-wing statements he made as an undercover journalist investigating the white radical right have been misrepresented as his real views. Schmidt’s accusers claim these statements reflect his real views, and are part of a larger pattern of ongoing right-wing thought and action.
4. This is the second ZACF statement on the Schmidt affair, in the sense that ZACF was party to a statement issued by the global Anarkismo network on 29 September 2015, which currently comprises over a dozen revolutionary anarchist groups on five continents, most, historically, from the Global South. This statement did not take sides, but called instead for a careful evaluation of the case, the release of all evidence, and on AK Press to state that the accusations applied to Schmidt alone (not to everyone with whom he had been associated (www.anarkismo.net/article/28576). This statement was not acknowledged by Reid Ross and Stephens, or AK Press. The gravity of the allegations does not justify a lack of fair process.
5. ZACF completely distances itself from any and all racist and fascist and white supremacist positions, and condemns them in the strongest possible terms.
6. ZACF completely distances itself from any offensive statements that Schmidt has made, regardless of the rationale for such statements. We are disgusted by what we have read, and by the number of these statements, and note that these statements are indeed deeply racist and sometimes fascist. The “manifesto” and blog posts attributed to Schmidt on the right wing website Stormfront and on his blog at strandwolf.blogspot.com (linked to a group he now admits to setting up named Black Battlefront) are horrifying. It is very difficult for us to reconcile these awful blog posts (and those of several related online personas) with our experiences of Michael Schmidt as an active and dedicated member of our organisation.
7. ZACF views the accusations against Schmidt with the utmost gravity. If the accusations are proven true, ZACF will denounce Schmidt and take all appropriate steps. If proven, the accusations would indicate activities and views completely at odds with the positions and practice and social composition of the ZACF, at odds with the class-struggle, anti-racist and anti-oppression anarchist and syndicalist traditions that ZACF champions, as well as manifest dishonesty on Schmidt’s part. And the ZACF would have been the primary victim of Schmidt’s activities. Schmidt, if guilty, must bear the consequences of his actions.
8. ZACF also wishes to put on record that Schmidt has not been a member or participant in ZACF for over five years, has played no role in the development of this statement, or in any proposals and points that this statement makes, and has not been shown drafts or asked for comment, and also that ZACF has not been lobbied by Schmidt – or anyone else – to make any particular statements on the Schmidt affair, 2015-2016.
9. It is our position that the Schmidt affair cannot be resolved through another round of online articles, social media debates or statements. Not only have the online debates become unproductive and polarised (see point 27) but so much information and analysis has been produced that it is very difficult for individuals and organisations to methodically process and evaluate all arguments made by both sides.
10. In terms of evaluating the charges against Schmidt, ZACF instead supports the 30 January 2016 Anarkismo proposal for an inclusive and international anarchist and syndicalist commission of inquiry, to examine the allegations against Schmidt, as well as Schmidt’s replies to the allegations, with accusers and accused and sources available to answer questions and provide materials to the commission. The proposal does not envisage an Anarkismo-controlled process. Nor would Reid Ross and Stephens, AK Press or Schmidt, decide on its composition. See http://anarkismo.net/article/29047
11. We believe there are real problems with some of the statements made by both the accusers of Schmidt against Schmidt himself, as well as in Schmidt’s responses to these accusations. These may be open to innocent explanations: we keep an open mind. The ZACF will make a formal submission to the proposed commission, and be available for questions and to provide additional materials to that commission. We have extensive archives and records, which back up our claims, for example, about ZACF history (see below).
12. ZACF will also consider itself guided by the findings and recommendations of the proposed commission. The ZACF will address all the allegations against Schmidt himself, as well as his defence, in a separate statement at the conclusion of the commission’s investigations.
13. ZACF wishes to place on record that when similar accusations were levelled against Schmidt from 2011 onwards, we confronted and checked on Schmidt several times. He has always maintained the same basic defence as that he has presented in 2015. Given the evidence we had to hand, and given Schmidt’s record and status as a long-standing comrade, we felt that we had no real choice but to give him the benefit of the doubt. Historically we have critically accepted Schmidt’s explanation for what we felt was the lack of an alternative, but we recognise that an extensive case has now been made against Schmidt, and new evidence brought to bear. This new material and debate merits careful reflection and evaluation, but must be weighed up carefully against his own counter-case – honestly and fairly.
14. ZACF expresses its disappointment with Schmidt’s now-admitted non-disclosure of aspects of his claimed underground journalistic work to the ZACF, both during his tenure in the ZACF and when it previously spoke to him from 2011 onwards. ZACF is highly disappointed by Schmidt’s now-admitted failure to inform ZACF that he knew the identity of a National Intelligence Agency (NIA) spy moving in left circles.
15. We do not, in this statement, therefore discuss whether Schmidt is indeed guilty of all the charges that have been made against him by AK Press, and Reid Ross and Stephens. This statement is not a point-by-point discussion of evidence around Schmidt, and should not be misconstrued as such. It is detailed, not to bury issues in words, but because serious allegations need a serious reply.
16. ZACF rejects the version of ZACF history and politics contained within Reid Ross and Stephens’ articles. We realise well enough that ZACF was not the focus of the articles, and take it in good faith that we entered the conversation only by way of association, but we have to respond to what constitutes (even if unintentionally) a series of very serious, very damaging (and, as we show, false) allegations about our organisation. They were not irrelevant to it, or trivialities that can be ignored on the grounds that the focus was on Schmidt.
17. ZACF specifically rejects the following central claims put foward by Reid Ross and Stephens: that the ZACF considered a proposal for racial segregation in 2003 (untrue), that Schmidt successfully engineered the expulsion of black and township ZACF members in 2005 to whittle ZACF into a white group (untrue), that ZACF’s organisational culture was deeply shaped by an allegedly racist and fascist Schmidt (untrue), that ZACF ignored evidence that Schmidt was involved with the radical right (untrue), that other ZACF members shared Schmidt’s alleged right-wing opinions (untrue), that ZACF opposed feminism (untrue), that a ZACF social centre and garden in Soweto was run on racist lines (untrue), and they speak of a “Schmidt-era” of ZACF lasting into 2009 (untrue). ZACF also rejects Reid Ross and Stephens’ claims about the “national” character of ZACF, claims about the 2007 ZACF congress, claims about ZACF financial practices, claims about ZACF organisational culture and standards, and claims that ZACF ignored a problematic document that Schmidt issued internally in 2008 called “Politico-Cultural Dynamics of the South African Anarchist Movement” (ZACF discussed and rejected the document, and Schmidt also formally repudiated it that year).
18. There is no evidence whatsoever that ZACF was subverted, before, during or after 2008 by any fascist or racist or radical white right agenda, by anyone whatsoever. We are not concerned here with the separate issue of what Schmidt might have done elsewhere, covertly or otherwise in this period, we are stating that ZACF was never influenced by these politics – and that Schmidt never openly pursued any such politics while in ZACF. Contrary to the impression given by Reid Ross and Stephens, ZACF has always strived to act decisively and in line with its revolutionary principles and approach. There was no transition from a so-called right-wing “Schmidt-era” of ZACF, to a new, transformed ZACF later: ZACF theory and perspectives never changed, and the black working class orientation of ZACF never changed.
19. This criticism of the articles is not a matter of “shooting-the-messenger,” but of demonstrating that the message (as regards ZACF) is wrong. It is essential to our honour as revolutionaries to challenge, on the basis of facts, the profoundly inaccurate Reid Ross and Stephens’ version of ZACF history and politics, to clarifying the record of the ZACF, this including Schmidt’s role in ZACF, and ZACF’s relations to Schmidt, when he was a member, and subsequently.
20. Reid Ross and Stephens’ inaccurate representation of ZACF is based on poor research and analysis, and serious factual and analytical problems, regarding not just ZACF but South Africa generally. Eurocentrism and an uncritical embrace by the two journalists of deeply problematic anti-left arguments associated with the South African state and ultra-nationalists, but rooted in the colonial geography of reason, are part of the problem.
21. No use was made of easily available ZACF source materials and archives, and the two journalists have failed to contact ZACF throughout the series to check facts or to provide right-of-reply to charges made. Their account of ZACF is almost entirely based on the views of one former member active for a relatively short period, outsider opinions, dubious inferences from an inaccurate document by Schmidt that was rejected by ZACF, and unsubstantiated and often demonstrably false assertions. The history of ZACF cannot be based on so few sources, especially given that claims made by these sources contradict a larger body of other evidence that has been ignored.
22. Silencing black and African voices, and the ZACF, has been central to the articles’ methodology. ZACF sources were ignored. Contradictory data and testimony was ignored. In particular this relates to one ZACF ex-member and founder member, comrade Mzamani Philip Nyalungu, who was made central to one article (in fact he is the only person we feel was insulted by name, besides Schmidt, in their seven articles.) His testimony, at odds with key claims by the journalists, was not cited, yet the testimony of two white ex-ZACF members was repeatedly presented as self-evidently true. This can be construed as racist: while Reid Ross and Stephens may argue that they have grounds to criticise Schmidt harshly, there is no justification for this treatment of a serious black working class militant.
23. Claims that we are unduly emotional about what we feel is an unjustifiable misrepresentation of the ZACF, that trivialise this misrepresentation, or that present ZACF as ill-informed or ill-motivated, reflect the same colonial and silencing outlook.
24. There was a double-standard throughout the discussion of ZACF, which placed ZACF in a subordinate position, and had racial overtones. Reid Ross and Stephens stated that they concealed the names of the sources cited to ensure their personal security. Yet they provided the name and residential information of a prominent, township-based, black working class ex-ZACF member, while diligently concealing the details of a white middle class ex-ZACF member, no longer even resident in South Africa. No account was taken of the often violently intolerant contexts in which ZACF operates, and how the claims made in the articles against ZACF place it and its members at risk. If Schmidt was a fascist, racist infiltrator who was allegedly sufficiently dangerous to require that sources be kept concealed for safety, as the journalists insisted, then their immediate responsibility was actually to inform ZACF of a potentially deadly security threat. This would have allowed us to take immediate steps for the security of our black working class base. This never happened.
25. The same double standard was evident in the contrasting treatment of AK Press and ZACF. ZACF believes it completely unacceptable that Reid Ross and Stephens informed AK Press of their investigations into Schmidt and pending articles, allowing it to avoid reputational damage with a pre-emptive public statement – yet did not contact ZACF in a similar manner.
26. The development of the Schmidt affair raises questions about the future of the anarchist movement in the Global South and elsewhere. Certainly if Schmidt is guilty there are grounds for serious concern, but we have in mind here other issues that are just as important. The absence of a proper right-of-reply prior to publication, for both ZACF and Schmidt, the neglect for the safety and wellbeing of a black ZACF founder member, the hostile and personalised tone of many claims in the articles, the trial-by-media that has taken place, and the serious inaccuracies in the story around the ZACF, are some of the problems.
27. The ZACF also expresses its serious concern about the venomous and polarised tone that online debates on the Schmidt affair have assumed. A vocal anti-Schmidt current dominates many forums by relying, not on substantive debate, but on innuendos and on labelling, with any disagreement with any part of Reid Ross and Stephens’ / AK Press’ claims treated as the work of fascists, racists, tools of Schmidt etc. In this climate, those with contrary views soon withdraw, rational debate is closed, and more nuanced views that do not fit a neat pro-/ anti-Schmidt position, are lost. This is not a constructive approach to any debate, regardless of the severity of the accusations.
28. A sectarian current has also used the Schmidt affair to attack the ZACF, Anarkismo, and the whole anarcho-syndicalist, revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist-communist mainstream of anarchism. The simple fact of the matter is that, if Schmidt is indeed guilty, he would have betrayed the basic principles of class-struggle anarchism, the ZACF he helped found, the anarchists he has worked with as a militant and as a writer, and the movement generally. Therefore it is false to assume that if Schmidt is guilty, that his views represent, or arise from, class-struggle or Platformist/especifista anarchist traditions.
29. We are appalled that the worst public caricature that has ever been made of the ZACF comes, not from the state, not from capital, not from other left groups, but from people who claim to be anarchists. This is not a sign of a healthy movement.
30. ZACF believes there are also serious North/ South power dynamics at play in the affair that need attention. Precisely because countries like the USA dominate media, knowledge production and publication globally, even obscure writers in the Global North have a louder voice than almost any in the Global South. This is the context that allows the tiny collective running the America-based publishing house AK Press, and two minor (although doubtless well-intentioned and sincere – we are not debating their personalities) American journalists, Reid Ross and Stephens, to propagate their views on a global scale. ZACF simply has no commensurate power, this being directly linked to its African basis.
31. This North/ South situation allows the views of ZACF and Anarkismo, representing far more people and countries than one American publishing cooperative and two American journalists, to be completely marginalised, power reinforcing the process of silencing the African and black and ZACF voices that we have mentioned. It allows AK Press to effectively ban from publication Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which was primarily authored by one-time ZACF member, comrade Lucien van der Walt, almost a decade ago, as part of a larger project with Schmidt. It allows Anarkismo’s efforts to democratise the AK Press space by taking responsibility, qualifying its claims, and carrying different views on the story, to be ignored. It allows Reid Ross and Stephens to say what they wish about ZACF from behind the secure walls of the dollar and the American legal system. And it allows the unedifying spectacle of two white Americans doling out advice on racial politics and “the deleterious effects of institutionalized power disparities” to African and black anarchist revolutionaries.
32. We reject the AK Press collective’s attempts to deny responsibility in this affair. By their own admission, they worked with Reid Ross and Stephens to investigate Schmidt, and collaborated with them in compiling evidence; and they have provided the main platform for the mass dissemination of Reid Ross and Stephens’ seven articles. They are as responsible as Reid Ross and Stephens for what the ZACF has endured.
33. All of this is far from the prefigurative, solidaristic and internationalist movement we would like to see change the world. To avoid similar situations in future, we advocate a code of conduct for anarchist or anarchist-identified writers and journalists, that measures be put in place to keep small collectives controlling massive resources – including publishers like AK Press – accountable to the movements they claim to serve, the development of a more inclusive anarchist press, in which voices from working class and peasant movements, from ghettoes, from townships, from labour movements, from the oppressed nationalities and classes, and from the Global South as well as the Global North, are central.
34. ZACF also believes that substantial sectors of the self-identified anarchist movement need to have some serious introspection about the political culture of venom, sectarianism, and McCarthyite-style paranoia, obsessed with ultra-fringe forces like “national-anarchism,” exposed in the Schmidt affair. This that often substitutes for, and certainly hinders, building a mass, sustained, organised anarchism and syndicalism rooted in the popular classes, in labour movements, in oppressed nationalities, and in actual revolutionary struggles. Approaches like those proposed by Anarkismo and ZACF – a cautious approach to serious allegations, the use of a commission – can play an important role in this process.
35. We do not object to debate, or to criticism or self-reflection. Nor do we object to the anarchist and syndicalist movement having open and frank discussions. We do not call for a unity based on ignoring differences or on silence. We welcome open and honest debate as an essential part of an effective political practice. But what we do object to are debates based on sectarianism, personal attacks, innuendos, labelling, and bullying, and a lack of sensitivity to power dynamics.
36. We wish to stress that we have no personal issues with either Reid Ross or Stephens, neither of whom we know. We have no objections to critique. And we note Reid Ross emailed us on 27 December 2015 to state, “You have only my deepest respect for carrying on your incredible work” and stated he was “deeply sorry” if the articles created problems for ZACF. He also stated, “It was always my intention to remove both your collective and Lucien [van der Walt] from the investigation in such a way that would prevent a kind of ‘witch hunt’ effect.” We appreciate this effort to reach out to us, and the sentiment contained in these statements.
37. But the fact remains that the articles have, whether intentional or not, promoted falsehoods about ZACF, created serious problems for ZACF, silenced and even lectured ZACF. Neither AK Press, nor Stephens, nor Reid Ross have admitted this publicly; AK Press cancelled “Black Flame,” of which comrade van der Walt was primary author, Reid Ross and Stephens slated that book in their articles and by implication comrade van der Walt, and the articles presented ZACF as fundamentally subverted by a fascist and racist agenda. This obviously creates problems for ZACF.
38. Although Black Flame has, like any book, various flaws, and is not a ZACF publication, we insist that it is a revolutionary anarchist classic that remains of enduring value. It is a non-Eurocentric South-centred text that, for the first time, places people of colour, the Global South and struggles against imperialism and racism at the very centre of the history, canon and movements of historic anarchism and syndicalism. Reid Ross and Stephens themselves concede the book asserts the “primacy of class struggle and workers’ movements” in a global anarchist struggle – and this is not a rightist or a nationalist position.
39. We therefore urge both Reid Ross and Stephens, as well as members of the AK Press collective, not to fire off a hasty response to what we have written, but to consider seriously and respectfully the problems they have created for ZACF, one of the main anarchist organisations in Africa. And to admit there is fault, and that there are errors in the articles and the process that created them. We have no personal issues with any of these parties: we are raising issues of principle and process that deserve due consideration and a respectful conversation. We urge them to avoid statements that trivialize what has been done to ZACF, and how it has been done, or that evade responsibility by suggesting our responses are unduly emotional or ignorant.
40. If they are deeply sorry for the problems they created, as Reid Ross stated in his e-mail to the ZACF, they should issue a public apology to ZACF and to comrades Nyalungu and van der Walt (approved by ZACF in advance), for the misrepresentations that have been made, and also make a clear public statement (approved by ZACF in advance) explicitly stating that the allegations that they have made against Schmidt refer to Schmidt alone, and not to any publishers, co-authors, editors, left organisations or currents with which he may have been associated. (To his credit, Reid Ross has suggested that he is amiable to the idea of such a statement although we note that it has not, so far, appeared. We note with appreciation a statement by Reid Ross published on 17 February ( http://alexanderreidross.com/ideological-influence-and-the-schmidt-affair/ [10]) in which he states that “some have implicated the wrong people, groups, or sets of ideas”, but do not feel this goes far enough in addressing our concerns and ameliorating the damage done to the political work, dignity and reputation of the ZACF, comrades Nyalungu and van der Walt or “Black Flame”.)
CONTENTS:
**SECTION 1: THE ZACF, AN AFRICAN REVOLUTIONARY CLASS-STRUGGLE ANARCHIST / SYNDICALIST FORMATION
*1A. ZACF: Politics, Record and the Black Working Class Revolution *1B. Locating ZACF in Southern Africa’s Radical “Humanism” and Revolutionary Non-Racialism *1C. Online Resources on the ZACF
**SECTION 2: ANARKISMO & ZACF POSITIONS ON THE MICHAEL SCHMIDT ISSUE SO FAR
*2A. Overview of the 2015 Controversy over Michael Schmidt *2B. How Anarkismo and ZACF Intervened at the Start of the Michael Schmidt Controversy *2C. A Proposed Anarchist/ Syndicalist Commission into the Charges against Schmidt in 2016 *2D. FACT: ZACF Questioned Schmidt When Similar Allegations were made from 2011 Onwards *2E. FACT: ZACF has Not Yet Taken a Position For or Against Schmidt in 2015/ 2016
**SECTION 3: GRAVE CONCERNS WITH REID ROSS & STEPHENS’ ACCOUNT OF ZACF
*3A. A Summary of Reid Ross & Stephens’ Inaccurate Claims about ZACF *3B. FACT: The ZACF Never Considered any Proposal for “Segregation,” Argued Instead for a Black Working Class Focus, in 2003 *3C. FACT: The ZACF Never “Purged” Township Groups or Members *3D. FACT: ZACF Mass Work in Motsoaledi, Soweto as Against Reid Ross & Stephens’ Disrespect for Comrade Nyalungu and PMCP/ BAG *3E. FACT: ZACF Spending and ZACF Democracy *3F. FACT: The 2007 ZACF Congress Aimed to Rebuild the ZACF Presence in the Black Working Class *3G. FACT: The ZACF (and Schmidt) Rejected Schmidt’s “Politico-Cultural Dynamics …” Document in 2008 *3H. FACT: The Revolutionary Politics of “Black Flame” *3I. FACT: Dispelling the Myth of a ZACF Debate on the “Recruitment of People of Colour” and of ZACF Becoming “Increasingly Open” *3J. FACT: Claims that Schmidt Allegedly Voted FF+ were Never Ignored *3K. FACT: Dispelling the Myth of a ZACF Debate on the “Inclusion of Feminism,” 2009-2010 *3L. FACT: Dispelling the Myth of a Debate on Working with “Collectives with Ideological Differences,” 2009-2010
**SECTION 4: METHODOLOGY: SOME REASONS FOR THE PROBLEMS IN REID ROSS & STEPHENS’ ZACF RESEARCH
*4A. Extraordinarily Narrow Data Collection, which Silenced ZACF, African and Black Anarchists *4B. A Selective Use of Evidence and Leading the Witness *4C. The Need to Distinguish Direct Witness Testimony, Second-hand Information and Opinion *4D. Research Problems with Excessively Using Anonymous Sources *4E. Fact-Checking Controlled by the Authors *4F. Was Such Extensive Anonymity Really Required? *4G. Time Constraints Do Not Explain the Mistakes *4H. The Lack of a Proper Editorial or Peer-Review Process
**SECTION 5: THEORETICAL FRAMING: SOME REASONS FOR THE PROBLEMS IN REID ROSS & STEPHENS’ ANALYSIS
*5A. Authoritarian Nationalism and Colonial Reason: The Roots of Anti-Left Arguments *5B. The Unknown Country: Reading South Africa off the USA and Western Europe
**SECTION 6: POLITICAL ISSUES IN THE AFFAIR – AND HOW A BETTER ANARCHISM IS POSSIBLE
*6A. For a Constructive Debate, Against Sectarianism *6B. The Importance of Consistent Principles: The Double Standards of Personal Security in the Schmidt Affair *6C. The AK Press Connection: Also Guilty *6D. The North/ South Dynamics of the Schmidt Affair
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 