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by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jan 12, 2015 2:19 am
Rape is the act by which fear and pain are united in love. It is the
triumph of harmony through oppression.
Rape teaches balance, the natural balance of man=above/woman=below.
This balance is a lesson which woman must learn, and only man can
teach her.
by Project Willow » Mon Jan 12, 2015 4:24 am
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jan 12, 2015 6:17 am
by Project Willow » Mon Jan 12, 2015 6:18 am
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jan 12, 2015 7:11 am
by American Dream » Mon Jan 12, 2015 10:08 am
EC: Are the settler societies of North America different from the racist and imperialist countries in Europe in any kind of fundamental way which should be important to anti-fascists?
JS: Which takes us into somewhat different ground. i'm not knowledgeable enough on European politics – or on Canada – so that i could do a list of point by point comparisons. What i'd like to do instead is to talk about u.s. society, and readers themselves can see if the comparisons make any sense. And, yes, i've run into young fascists of the "stormtrooper" variety, with their gray semi-waffen s.s. uniforms, open veneration of Hitler, open talk of "mud races", etc. i still think that fascism here has been very influenced by its birth within a settler society, instead of being just some lame copy of the German experience. Just as Israeli settler neo-fascism has a very different language and public look from that of their Nazi tutors (taking a religious fundamentalist form).
The most conspicuous difference between Europe and North America was class in the outward form of race. In the centuries before World War II, the overwhelming mass of the European populations were poor and in misery. They were the proletarian classes, the laborers, poor peasants, and oppressed industrial workers. But in the settler colonies and nations, the lowest classes, the proletarians, were the natives, the conquered, or the imported colonial laborers. While white settler workers were automatically, from birth, no matter how poor, a whole level up. As W.E.B. DuBois remarked about poor white workers in the post-Civil War South. Thanks to imperialism. Which is why the mass of French colons in Algeria solidly supported imperialism against the Algerian people. Why millions of working class and poor whites in the segregationist u.s. South were more than willing to help police and kill and terrorize Black people. And even today, a century and more later, if we left it up to the white majority, the u.s. would secede from NAFTA and the WTO all right – and fly the Confederate flag!
In many settler societies, historically the white population not only supported the police, in part they were the police. Unlike in Old Europe, where in general the masses of people were kept disarmed and landless, in settler colonies often the entire euro-male culture revolved around common and cheap access to land and rifles and the bodies of the oppressed. Posses or militias or "Committees of Correspondence" or lynch mobs of armed men enforced the local settler dictatorship over Indians, Latinos, Afrikans, Asians, North Afrikans, women, etc. And white men of all classes joined in, to affirm their membership in the most important "class" of all. Settlerism filled the space that fascism normally occupies.
So in the 1920s and 1930s large fascist movements arose in Old Europe out of the bitter class deadlock in war-torn societies. But in the u.s. then, while there were small fascist groups and certainly real currents of sympathizers (enough to fill Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on one occasion), there was no mass movement for fascist seizure of power itself. Nor was the ruling class close to implementing fascism. The sputtering flareups of attempted fascist coups by ruling class elements against the reformist Roosevelt New Deal (Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune newspaper calling for the assassination of the President, or the DuPont abortive seizure of Washington using suborned u.s. marines) were easily shrugged off. There was major u.s. imperialist support for Italian, Spanish and German fascism before and even during World War II, as opposed to support for fascism at home. Fascism was distinct from racism or white supremacy, which were only " As American as apple pie."
Neither the ruling class nor the white masses had any real need for fascism. What for? There was no class deadlock paralyzing society. There already was a long standing, thinly disguised settler dictatorship over the colonial proletariat in North America. In the u.s. settlerism made fascism unnecessary. However good or bad the economic situation was, white settlers were getting the best of what was available. Which was why both the white Left and white Far Right alike back then in the 1930s were patriotic and pro-American. Now only the white Left is.
The white Left here is behind in understanding fascism. When they're not using the word loosely and rhetorically to mean any repression at all (like the frequent assertions that cutting welfare is "fascism"! i mean, give us a break!), they're still reciting their favorite formula that the fascists are only the "pawns of the ruling class". No, that was Nazism in Germany, maybe, though even there that's not a useful way of looking at it. But definitely not here, not in that old way.
The main problem hasn't been fascism in the old sense – it's been neo colonialism and bourgeois democracy! The bourgeoisie didn't need any fascism at all to put Leonard Peltier away in maximum security for life or Mumia on death row. They hunted down the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement like it was deer hunting season, while white America went shopping at the mall – all without needing fascism. And the steady waterfall of patriarchal violence against women, of rapes and torture and killings and very effective terrorism on a mass scale, should remind us that the multitude of reactionary men have "equal opportunity " under "democracy ", too. They don't need fascism – yet.
Right now under neo-colonial "democracy", the system of patrolling and confining the Black Nation is at a fever pitch. Every known narcotic is being shoved and shoveled onto the streets of the Nation like it was confetti at parade time – coke, heroin, malt liquor, Bud, crack, commodified sex, you name it. The huge 2 million inmate u.s. prison system contains the largest single Black community of all. One out of every four Black men in Washington, D.C. is in jail, prison, on parole or probation, or awaiting trial – i.e. under direct supervision by the law enforcement system . Even Ronald K. Noble, the new Secretary General-designate of INTERPOL, has written that he regularly gets stopped, questioned, and sometimes even searched by u.s. police (in Europe, too, of course). And if the top law enforcement official in the capitalist world gets routinely stopped as a Black man for u.s. racial police checks, guess what happens to the unemployed, to young working class Black men.
The old Black industrial working class has been largely wiped out, and warlord armies and gangs given informal state permission to rule over much of the inner city at gunpoint. A few years ago i went home with a comrade. When we got off the bus, all the passengers started walking home down the middle of the street. My friend explained that all the sidewalks were "owned" by one or another dope gang or dealer, reserved for their crew and customers. You walked in the street or you got taken down by a 9mm. While the new Black middle class takes itself out of the game, flees the old communities and disperses itself into the suburbs.Why would capitalists need fascism? "Democracy" is doing the job for them full gale force – and let's not forget that North America has at the same time become the conscience of the world lecturing everyone else on human rights. "How sweet it is!" ( Guess Leonard Peltier must be a prisoner in China ).
But i am not saying that the situation is static, or that past history isn't being razed and rebuilt. All variants of capitalist metropolitan societies are becoming slowly but surely more alike, Quebec and Raleigh, Tokyo and Frankfurt, as capital expands, develops, and merges. While Western European farmers complain about McDonalds and agrobusiness, they willingly accept the most significant "Americanization" – the replacement of Western European labor with Algerians, Turks, Albanians, etc. Throughout Europe the proletariat has been pushed outside of national boundaries socially – just as euro-settlerism once did in the Third World – and is being redefined as Arab, Filipino, Algerian, Turkish, Albanian, Afrikan, and so on.
And, as Arghiri Emmanuel has noted, imperialism is gradually abandoning its own kith and kin, its settler societies. We first saw this in Kenya in 1960, where the British settler colony was unceremoniously dumped after the Mau Mau Rebellion in favor of an Afrikan neo-colonial regime. Then in Algeria, where French imperialism gave up on what had by their laws been an actual province of France – and left a million French Algerian settlers to lose their farms and homes and possessions, to flee in a frenzied mass evacuation. Capitalism has no loyalties, after all, only interests (to paraphrase a famous statesman). It was only then that the colons and their military sympathizers sought an end to French bourgeois democracy, to start a new fascist interlude. Even in North America settlers are being told by imperialism to move over and make room for new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Afrika. To pay the bill as the state gives back some land and reparations and tax concessions to Native nations. And they certainly hate it!
So there is a certain convergence, of settler and non-settler metropolitan societies becoming more alike. In the u.s. the increasingly global ruling class has no need of domestic fascism – so far. But white mass politics is not confined to taking phone calls from the ruling class. Far from it.
EC: How do you view the rise of the Far Right, specifically the American Far Right?
JS: We can see that neo-fascism is a growing factor in u.s.politics. Still marginal, but already more significant than,say, white Marxism. The Far Right is politically strong enough, represents so much mass sentiment, that its momentary electoral champion – Pat Buchanan – has become the hero of some trade unions and the closet ally of white socialists and anarchists in the anti-WTO campaign. [for more details on the right wooing the left in the anti-globalization movement, see My Enemy's Enemy, published by Anti-Fascist Forum] And again, to understand this dynamic we have to lay aside 1930s' political formulas and take the social reality in a fresh way. Were Timmy McVeigh and his comrades "tools of the ruling class" when they dusted the federal building in Oklahoma City? Does finance capital & the big bourgeoisie pull the strings behind the Militia Movement as it spreads doctrines of tax resistance, seizing federal land, and targeting the imperialist state as white man's main enemy? You'd have to be nuttier than they are to believe that! The old "pawns of the ruling class" 1930s analysis of European fascism do not apply right here in the old way.
This is too big a subject for me to go into fully here, but the broad outline is obvious. The Far Right is growing steadily, moving on the offensive, as white settler society itself is fragmenting and being forced to gradually give up its old national form under immense pressures from the new global imperialism. In this fragmentation, some sectors and classes of the old settler society are now more open to neo-fascism in their desperate search for a new civilization for themselves in which they will still be masters of the land.
While in Europe the much larger fascist current has manifested itself by violent attacks on immigrant labor and on defending the concept of the old nations, in the u.s. the New Right is primarily concerned with attacking the u.s. state itself, using both armed struggle and mass political organizing, and founding new self-governing cults and societies . That is to say, it is an emerging revolutionary movement, albeit still a small one. The Left has little daily contact with the fascists, because they are in different classes and live in different geographic areas and are in diverging societies.
In the best guerrilla fashion, this New Right is by-passing the major cities, with their massive Third World populations, corporate economies and large state machinery. Rather, their focus is on winning de facto power inside the marginalized white male populations. Romeoville, Illinois rather than Chicago. Prisons rather than Ivy League colleges. Theirs is a re-statement of the early settler vision, of setting up independent outposts of a racially-cleansed culture, on re-pioneered white land. With heavily armed bands of once again masculine white men pushing out the mercenary u.s. authorities. For a period of time we could see both white fascist Right and the white Left – working in geographically separate cultures on this vast continent – grow without impinging on or really clashing with each other. Both mostly white "Free Mumia" campaigns in the old major cities and the quiet ouster of federal agents from Western lands.
The old Right of the 1920s Klan or 1960s White Citizens Councils or Minutemen or Jewish Defense League were patriotic & pro-u.s.a. They saw themselves as "saving" the traditional America, and often cooperated closely with and were led by local business, police, the f.b.i. and government officials.
In a major reversal, the new Far Right is radically anti-American. It sees their white male settler empire of "America from sea to shining sea" as really lost. Its cities taken over by the sub-human millions of the "mud races", its economy drained by the "Jew banks" and the alien corporate economy, its culture polluted by hostile genetic contaminants, its once-proud citizens increasingly without rights and dictated to by the shell of the former "u.s.government" which is now the "Zionist Occupation Government". And while the masses of conservative euro-amerikans are not yet fascist, neither are they anti-fascists.
And the hard-core of the new Far Right is very fascist, since neo-fascism represents the basic ideology that the aspiring white "lumpenbourgeoisie" need to restart and reorganize a part of settler society as their own private fiefdom. The u.s. constitution just doesn't work for them. Just as Trudjman and Milosevic, who once were Yugoslavian patriots and "socialists" when that met their class interests, turned to neo fascism and genocidal ethnic nationalism to be "born again" as the local "lumpenbourgeoisie" under global imperialism.
Take the David Duke phenomenon. As we all know, in 1990 Louisiana state representative David Duke ran for the u.s. senate. In losing Duke still won a large majority of the statewide white vote, some 57%. His highest percentage of votes came from white workers with incomes under $15,000 a year. This despite the fact that Duke was and is notorious not "merely" as a racist, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life as a very public neo-nazi organizer, propagandist, and leader. He was opposed by both Republican and Democratic Parties, and the churches, civic and business organizations. The entire media machine kept exposing and criticizing him, repeatedly running old photos of him in his American Nazi Party uniform. Yet, if it wasn't for the Black voters, David Duke – naked fascist agenda and all – would have emerged as one of the most powerful politicians and in the u.s. senate. You can see why granting Black people the vote was so important to u.s. imperialism – and why the white masses were carefully never given a chance to directly vote on it!
For sure, the growth of fascism here has many class contradictions of its own, and their Aryan future is far from certain. But it is significant that while the masses of euro-amerikans are not fascists, being neo-fascist is quietly acceptable to many of them. Today the radical future is dividing into those who – whatever their strategies and ideologies – recognize that fact, and those who still wish to avoid facing it.
by American Dream » Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:47 pm
If leftists set out from nationalist premises, immigration can appear to divide the working class, making the formation of socialist movements more difficult. A more accurate and more radical premise is that such divisions stem from the nation state system and imperialism. That being the case, it is no wonder that racialized outsiders have been central to keeping socialist-internationalist flames alive.
Gareth Dale, Race, Nation And Class Formation
by American Dream » Tue Jan 13, 2015 4:54 am
Confronting Fascism centers on an essay by Don Hamerquist, formerly of the Sojourner Truth Organization, and an extended reply by J. Sakai, a Maoist best known for his book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. Hamerquist and Sakai are both independent Marxists who have worked with anarchist anti-fascists and been influenced by anti-authoritarian critiques of dogmatic Marxism. Like Thalheimer, Mason, and Vajda, they emphasize that fascism is an independent political force, not a capitalist puppet or policy. But Hamerquist and Sakai go much further than this, presenting fascism as a right-wing revolutionary force. In Sakai’s words, “Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”23
Hamerquist and Sakai argue that most leftists seriously underestimate fascism’s potential to attract mass support within the United States and worldwide. Capitalism’s developing contradictions, they argue, create growing opportunities for a resurgence of fascist movements. Far from being a frozen relic of the past, fascism is a dynamic political force that includes a range of factions and tendencies and is evolving in response to changing conditions. Fascist groups feed on popular hostility to big business and the capitalist state, and some of them present an oppositional militance that looks more serious and committed than that of most leftist groups today. (Hamerquist particularly cites “third position” fascists, who claim to reject both the left and the right, but the argument is not limited to these groups.) The main danger of fascism today, Hamerquist argues, is not that it will seize power, but that it “might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left” causing “massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency.”24
A related danger that Hamerquist raises is a convergence between fascists and sections of the radical left. He points to leftward overtures from sections of the far right, and tendencies within much of the left that mesh dangerously with fascism, such as male supremacy, glorification of violence, leader cultism, hostility to open debate and discussion, and elitism. Hamerquist notes that German Communists in the early 1930s sometimes made tactical alliances with the Nazis against the Social Democrats because they considered Social Democrats the bigger threat.
Hamerquist warns that U.S. fascist groups are actively organizing around a number of issues that leftists often consider to be “ours,” such as labor struggles, environmentalism, opposition to police repression, U.S. imperialism, and corporate globalization. This kind of fascist popular appeal is nothing new. As Sakai points out, both Mussolini and Hitler galvanized people largely by attacking established elites and promoting an anti-bourgeois militance that seemed much more exciting and dynamic than conventional left politics. “Many youth in 1930s Germany viewed the Nazis as liberatory. As opposed to the German social-democrats, for example, who preached the dutiful authority of parents over children, the Hitler Youth gave rebellious children the power to keep their own hours, have an active sex and political life, smoke, drink and have groups of their own.”25
In different ways, both Hamerquist and Sakai argue that fascism’s radical approach shapes its relationship with capitalism. Of the two writers, Sakai’s position is closer to a Bonapartist model. He describes fascism as “anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist.” Under fascist regimes, “capitalism is restabilized but the bourgeoisie pays the price of temporarily no longer ruling the capitalist State.” But for Sakai this conflict is much starker than it is for Bonapartism theorists. Today’s fascism “is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie… to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning ‘multicultural’ bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy.”26
Sakai argues that fascism radically reshapes the capitalist social order to create an economy of “heightened parasitism”: “a lumpen-capitalist economy more focused on criminality, war, looting and enslavement.” He describes how Hitler’s regime elevated millions of German workers into a new parasitic class of soldiers, policemen, and bureaucrats and replaced them with a new proletariat of foreign and slave laborers, retirees, and women. This process “created an Aryan society that had never existed before” -– giving Nazi racial categories a concrete, social reality that was qualitatively new (but which paralleled the color-line divisions of U.S. society).27
Sakai’s discussion belies claims that Hitler’s regime had little or no impact on the socioeconomic order. We should remember, however, that this discussion does not apply to Italian Fascism, which lacked Nazism’s overarching racialist imperative and never consolidated the same degree of control over the state. Its effect on the socioeconomic order was far more limited.
Hamerquist takes fascist anti-capitalism more seriously than Sakai does. He notes that current-day fascist movements encompass various positions on how to relate to the capitalist class, from opportunists who want to cut a deal, to pro-capitalist revolutionaries who want to pressure big business into accepting fascist rule, to some third positionists who want to overthrow the economic ruling class entirely. It is unclear how serious a challenge to capitalist economic power any fascists would mount in practice. Where it has been tested, fascist anti-capitalism has meant opposition to “bourgeois values,” specific policies, or a “parasitic” wing of capital (such as Jewish bankers) -– not the capitalist system. On the other hand, as Hamerquist warns, it would be dangerous for leftists to dismiss the prospect of a militantly anti-capitalist fascism simply because it doesn’t fit our preconceptions.
Hamerquist’s concept of fascist anti-capitalism rests partly on his analysis (following German left communist Alfred Sohn-Rethel) that German Nazism foreshadowed “a new ‘transcapitalist’ exploitative social order.” In particular, Hamerquist argues, German fascism’s genocidal labor policy broke with capitalist principles. Not just labor power, but workers themselves were “consumed in the process of production just like raw materials and fixed capital,” thus obliterating “the distinctively capitalist difference between labor and other factors of production.” True, “normal” capitalist development involves genocide “against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class.” But by contrast, “the German policy was the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes” –- i.e., the importation of colonial-style mass killing into Europe’s industrial heartland.28
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Nazism was in the process of overthrowing the capitalist system. The labor policies Hamerquist describes did not call into question the economic power of big business, and arguably could not be sustained for more than a brief period. But the very fact that they were not sustainable may be part of the point. As Hamerquist reminds us, Marx warned that the contradictions of capitalism might end, not in socialist revolution, but in “barbarism,” “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Fascist revolution could be one version of this scenario.29
Here we should remember Thalheimer’s and Caplan’s point that the fascist state’s contradictory relationship with the business class -– defending its economic power but pursuing policies that eventually conflict with capitalist economic rationality -– is inherently unstable. In theory, this conflict could be resolved in various ways: (1) the collapse or overthrow of the fascist regime (as happened in Italy and Germany), (2) the conversion of fascist rule into a more conventional pro-capitalist regime, or (3) some kind of fascist overthrow of capitalist economic power. The last of these alternatives is the hardest to imagine, but cannot simply be dismissed as impossible or nonsensical. It would not abolish economic exploitation but would reshape it in fundamental ways, as Hamerquist suggests in his discussion of Nazi labor policy.
Sakai and Hamerquist also differ on the question of fascism’s class base. Like many others before him, Sakai links fascism to middle-class and declassed strata threatened or uprooted by rapid social and economic change -– historical losers who hate the big capitalists and want to get back the privilege they used to have. Sakai sees this dynamic in the Germans who rallied to Hitler during the Depression, the Timothy McVeigh figures who turn to neonazism as the old U.S. system of white privilege crumbles, and the Muslim world’s shopkeepers and unemployed college graduates hit by globalization, who are at the core of the pan-Islamic right. “To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes -– whether it be the peasantry or the salariat –- [fascism] offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the one’s [sic] giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others.”30
This discussion is helpful but oversimplified. The dynamics Sakai describes represent part of fascism’s appeal, and there is evidence that the middle classes and sections of the unemployed disproportionately supported fascism in the interwar period. But it would be a serious distortion to pigeonhole fascism as a movement of historical losers. Pre-World War II fascism didn’t just attract declining and uprooted middle classes such as small merchants, but also groups at the core of the new corporate economy, such as white-collar workers and professionals. The fascist vision criticizes modern decadence but also embraces many aspects of modernity. For example, as David Robert argues, Italian Fascism appealed to petty bourgeois activists as a vehicle for national integration, political reform, and large-scale industrial development.31
Furthermore, as Goeff Eley has pointed out about German Nazism, the movement’s dependence on a particular social class is less striking than its ability “to broaden its social base in several different directions” –- to construct “a broadly based coalition of the subordinate classes,” “without precedent in the German political system.” In contrast to the Social Democrats and Communists, who remained focused on the industrial working class, the Nazis (and to a lesser extent Italian Fascists) unified “an otherwise disjointed ensemble of discontents within a totalizing populist framework.”32
Hamerquist does not directly expand on his warning that militant fascism could build a mass base among insurgent workers (a possibility that Sakai questions). Although definitions of “working class” are subject to debate, several fascist movements in the 1930s seem to have attracted substantial numbers of workers, such as the Arrow Cross in Hungary and Father Coughlin’s Social Justice movement in the United States. In 1930-1933, workers made up about 30 percent of German Nazi Party members and a majority within the SA (Stormtroopers), the Nazis’ paramilitary wing.33
While they disagree about fascism’s class base, Hamerquist and Sakai agree that we need to rethink old leftist assumptions about fascism’s racial politics. As Hamerquist puts it, “there is no reason to view fascism as necessarily white just because there are white supremacist fascists. To the contrary there is every reason to believe that fascist potentials exist throughout the global capitalist system. African, Asian, and Latin American fascist organizations can develop that are independent of, and to some extent competitive with Euro-American ‘white’ fascism.”34 Coupled with this, some white fascists support Third World anti-imperialism or even disavow racial supremacy, and some have started to build links with socially conservative Black organizations such as the Nation of Islam.
Sakai notes that the mass displacement of Black workers over the past generation, coupled with the defeat of 1960s left Black nationalism, has fueled an unprecedented growth of authoritarian rightist organizations in the Black community. Sakai also argues that fascism’s key growth area now is in the Third World, where “pan-Islamic fascism” and related movements have largely replaced the left as the major anti-imperialist opposition force.
Unfortunately, Sakai and Hamerquist have little to say about what fascism means for women, as Xtn notes in the Introduction to Confronting Fascism. Sakai asserts that fascism is basically a male movement both in composition and outlook. In reality, as Xtn points out, fascist movements intensify patriarchy but often rely on mass support from both women and men. As I have argued elsewhere, all fascist movements are male supremacist, but they have embodied a range of doctrines on women and gender issues, both traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, and even including twisted versions of feminism. Fascism has sometimes recruited large numbers of women as active participants, largely by offering them specific benefits and opportunities -– in education, youth groups, athletics, volunteer work, and certain paid jobs -– even as it sharpened and centralized male dominance.
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 13, 2015 5:52 am
“Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”
by jakell » Tue Jan 13, 2015 6:58 am
Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:52 am wrote:“Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”
When those guys (Sakai and Hamerquist) talk about fascism and its power to generate mass support I also think it has to do with loss of economic power and status. They unhappy masses want what they lost as opposed to what they never had - its a different motivation to an uprising by the oppressed people of the world. Usually its economic security and some sort of status - i don't think losing one or the other isn't enough on its own.
Its the opposite of an oppressed uprising. Its an uprising by people who are facing a leveling of the playing field in some way. Often that leveling of the playing field costs them jobs and living standards but not the upper middle classes and ruling classes. It isn't really a leveling of the playing field, just lower economic standards to the lowest common denominator - driving down wages doesn't ever cost the bosses. They do use these movements tho, cos there's something essentially conservative about them, I guess its got to do with holding onto wealth and power.
Ultimately it means the grass roots fascists aren't resentful of the people rorting them - the boss class - they're resentful of "the other" people usurping their place in a hierarchy they essentially support. That is what i reckon anyway. What these guys describe is happening in Australia right now. The potential for a fascist mass movement is there... er here.
by Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:27 am
by American Dream » Thu Jan 15, 2015 11:58 pm
Idiots’ guide to the idiot far right
15 01 2015
To welcome in 2015, the Anti-Fascist Network has put together an idiots’ guide to the idiots on Britain’s far right. No need to thank us, it’s a public service.
British National Party
Introducing the man who will definitely revive the fortunes of the BNP…
Adam Walker
Formerly known as Britain’s most successful and ambitious fascist group since the 1930s, recent years have not been kind to the BNP. Membership and electoral support for the party has plummeted after a disappointing performance in the 2010 local and general elections. This unleashed a series of bitter internal disputes culminating in longstanding party leader Nick Griffin being unceremoniously booted out during 2014. Alongside Griffin, most prominent party members who were at least semi-competent and kept the show on the road have either resigned or been expelled. This has left the BNP bereft of people with the kind of basic skills necessary to do organise election campaigns or community work. Adam Walker, Griffin’s replacement, is uniquely poorly placed to lead the party. Although he lacks political skill, charisma or any observable talents, he does have a conviction for chasing children in his car and threatening them with a knife. The BNP thrived by occupying a political vacuum in working-class communities through community campaigning and hoovering up protest votes. The party’s patent inability to deliver what they promised to voters damaged their image as a viable opposition force while UKIP have stolen their thunder as the protest vote most likely to annoy the three main political parties. Once, the party had two MEPs, a member in the London Assembly and over 50 local councillors around the country. Now, they have been reduced to a solitary local councillor: Brian Parker in Pendle. Happily, the future looks gloomy for the BNP. The party has collapsed across much of the country and the party’s leadership is widely detested across the rest of the far right. The time is ripe to put the group out of business permanently.
Do say: The BNP is one of the only household names among Britain’s crowded far-right scene.
Don’t say: Oi Walker, leave those kids alone!
Britain First
Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen burns her own picture
During 2014, Britain First briefly transformed their image from a money-making scheme operated by former BNP fundraising chief Jim Dowson into the media’s number one scary Nazi bogeyman. Such publicity, however, did not translate into political success and following dismal results in the European elections, Dowson flounced out of the group. The group’s origins are in the BNP. Along with many other people, Dowson had a falling out with Nick Griffin and joined forces with ex-BNP Councillor Paul Golding to form another venture to suck cash from gullible racists. Dowson has a keen eye for publicity and the group carried out several headline-grabbing stunts, including launching ‘Christian Patrols’ in East London.
Paul Golding in earlier years with underpants on his head at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday
Dowson’s departure left the group in the incapable hands of Golding, who has tried to promote Britain First both as a respectable political party and as a militant street movement. Both of these strategies met with embarrassing failure in the Rochester and Strood by-election, when the party won a grand total of 56 votes and had their demonstrations in the town halted by anti-fascists. Having lots of ‘likes’ on Facebook doesn’t mean much on the streets Paul.
Do say: Organising ourselves into “battalions” is even more fun than going paintballing.
Don’t say: Would you buy a used car from this man?
British Democratic Party
The British Democratic Party functions as a retirement home for ageing fascists who have fallen out with Nick Griffin in recent years and either been booted out of the BNP, or left in a huff. The BDP emerged as a faction in the BNP desperate to find someone to challenge Nick Griffin for the party leadership and rallied around Andrew Brons, a man less charismatic than a cardboard cut-out of himself. Brons unsurprisingly lost the contest and made sure that his campaign had lost all momentum before launching his own party. The BDP do little apart from operate a website and it’s hard to avoid the welcome conclusion that its leading members are demoralised and exhausted after watching the BNP they worked so hard to build collapse very rapidly. The party managed to field only a handful of candidates in the 2014 and Brons did not even try to defend his seat in the European Parliament. With Brons out of the picture, this bunch of disgruntled no-hopers will likely sink without trace.
Do say: We’ve done well to avoid a BNP-style cult of personality…
Don’t say: …by electing the most boring man on the far right as our leader.
by American Dream » Fri Jan 16, 2015 11:27 am
How anti-immigrant myths serve the bosses
26 01 2014
by London Anti-Fascists
The relentless diet of anti-migrant hysteria served by the mainstream press for the past few months has been staggering, even by their standards. The Daily Express in particular outdid itself, promising a “crusade” against Bulgarian and Romanian immigration.
But as a study in the Guardian showed, there’s rarely much of a correlation between the headlines and the reality. The study showed that headlines about migrants have increase out of all proportion to the actual levels of immigration, which have tended to rise only slowly, and with the occasional dip.
Read the rest of this entry »
by American Dream » Fri Jan 16, 2015 12:40 pm
Bigots typically blame a specific group for a systemic problem—Jews for profit-driven capitalism, immigrants for economic recession—the same way people blame individual politicians for the corruption of politics. But the problem is the systems themselves. No matter who holds the reins, they produce the same power imbalances and petty indignities. The problem is not that they are broken, but that they are functioning in the first place.
Our enemies are not human beings, but the institutions and routines that estrange us from each other and from ourselves. There are more conflicts within us than between us. The same fault lines that run through our civilization run through our friendships and our hearts; this is not a clash between people, but between different kinds of relations, different ways of living. When we refuse our roles in the prevailing order, we open up those fault lines, inviting others to take a stand as well.
The best thing would be to do away with domination entirely—not to manage its details more fairly, not to shuffle the positions of who inflicts and who endures, not to stabilize the system by reforming it. The point of protest is not to call for more legitimate rules or rulers, but to demonstrate that we can act on our own strength, encouraging others to do the same and discouraging the authorities from interfering. This is not a question of war—a binary conflict between militarized enemies—but rather of contagious disobedience.
It is not enough only to educate and discuss, waiting for others’ hearts and minds to change. Until ideas are expressed in action, confronting people with concrete choices, the conversation remains abstract. Most people tend to remain aloof from theoretical discussions, but when something is happening, when the stakes are high and they can see meaningful differences between opposing sides, they will take a stand. We don’t need unanimity, nor a comprehensive understanding of the whole world, nor a road map to a precise destination—just the courage to set out on a different path.
by Searcher08 » Fri Jan 16, 2015 12:52 pm
jakell » Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:58 am wrote:Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:52 am wrote:“Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”
When those guys (Sakai and Hamerquist) talk about fascism and its power to generate mass support I also think it has to do with loss of economic power and status. They unhappy masses want what they lost as opposed to what they never had - its a different motivation to an uprising by the oppressed people of the world. Usually its economic security and some sort of status - i don't think losing one or the other isn't enough on its own.
Its the opposite of an oppressed uprising. Its an uprising by people who are facing a leveling of the playing field in some way. Often that leveling of the playing field costs them jobs and living standards but not the upper middle classes and ruling classes. It isn't really a leveling of the playing field, just lower economic standards to the lowest common denominator - driving down wages doesn't ever cost the bosses. They do use these movements tho, cos there's something essentially conservative about them, I guess its got to do with holding onto wealth and power.
Ultimately it means the grass roots fascists aren't resentful of the people rorting them - the boss class - they're resentful of "the other" people usurping their place in a hierarchy they essentially support. That is what i reckon anyway. What these guys describe is happening in Australia right now. The potential for a fascist mass movement is there... er here.
A slight nuance here, which can be levered up into something quite powerful... they are opposed to the loss of something they think they have lost (it's worth keeping Kubler Ross in mind). These this can actually be more significant because if a sense of loss is connected to something intangible, the stuff of myth and self-image, then it is less likely to be deflated by a reality check at some point.
I've been watching the far right in the UK for some time now, something more instructive than waving one's hands at some supposed international situation, and that sense of 'things lost', even though often based upon a shred of reality, is often inflated quite massively. These are based upon nationalist sentiments and are strong in themselves, when based upon racial identity the claims are even harder to counter.
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