The Struggle Against Neo-Fascism and the Path to Collective Liberation

Ndindi Kitonga

Summary: Presented at the International Marxist Humanist organization public meeting, The Fascist Threat: In the US, Internationally, and in History NOV 17, 2024 — Editors

DEATH THROES, DRAMA & THE DECAY OF NEOLIBERALISM

Many an autopsy of the 2024 U.S. election have been done. As revolutionaries, our sights are set beyond electoral politics and yet we need to develop a strong analysis of what occurred as part of our theorizing and organizing towards the liberated futures we want and deserve.

Some observations worth discussing:

  • Right-wing agendas would have to be pushed through in an atmosphere where progressive ideas such as raising the minimum wage, family leave, affordable healthcare, affordable housing, and funding school programs are popular. The corporate democrats ran to the right of this platform losing all the swing states. Meanwhile, two red states voted against proposed voucher schemes[1], 10 states considered abortion-rights initiatives with 7 of them voting in favor of reproductive rights[2], and Missouri and Alaska voted to raise the minimum wage[3].
  • Movements and issues can/are often co-opted within the Democratic party. The 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising enlivened a multi-racial working-class movement making revolutionary demands for widespread sociopolitical changes. During the 2020 U.S. elections, we see these radical energies funneled into electoral reformism and not much else. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reminds us that the Palestinian liberation struggle is difficult to appropriate in the same way the movement for Black Lives was[4]. As a zionist party, the Democrats were/are unable to offer anything more than “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” that never materializes. Interesting contradictions worth studying closely have emerged during this re-invigorated Palestinian liberation movement. How was the Harris campaign to convince young people on student campuses of impending fascism when the state and neoliberal institutions are eager to repress, surveil, sue, expel, and brutalize pro-Palestinian students?
  • The campaign was riddled with many other missteps. How did the campaign plan to engage immigrants by promising a border wall? How is it that the far-right campaigned on ending “forever wars” but the Harris team touted the Cheney’s and vowed “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”? And what a choice for the campaign to back-pedal on fossil fuels[5]!
  • What should we expect under an outright fascist order when Trump takes office? The red scare web will be cast further and further out. We will continue to see the term “communist” applied and misapplied to groups from trans rights advocates, to state bureaucrats and university administrators, to feminists, and to students fighting for Palestinian liberation, with the latter group being smeared as antisemites all ironically from what is now our official White Supremacist Christian nationalist ruling class. To be clear, the Black movement has been squashed under the guise of being a communist takeover plot whether those activities were revolutionary or not. A great example is that the struggle to desegregate schools was often framed as a communist scheme by white Christian conservatives. When it comes to college campuses, we will continue to see repression as many universities make new rules to not only squash pro-Palestinian activity but also labor mobilizations and other forms of dissent. The time and resources these institutions spent repressing activists’ speech and ratcheting up surveillance, could have been applied to addressing the mental health crisis for youth, teen, and college student homelessness, divesting from fossil fuels and weapons, living wages, and better work conditions for faculty, staff and students alike. The neoliberal resistance that will follow the implementation of these policies will not suffice. It therefore remains our responsibility to fight back from wherever we find ourselves.

 

JOIN AN ORGANIZATION, THEY SAID, IT WILL BE FUN, THEY SAID

So what has happened since Nov. 5? On a local level, organizations such as the DSA, mutual aid collectives, revolutionary groups, and even left-liberals like the women’s march have experienced a surge of new members across Los Angeles with a renewed interest in grassroots organizing and political mobilizing. More globally, many groups are releasing toolkits, training, and building resources in preparation for rapid response, especially around the issues of defending immigrants and unhoused persons, protecting gender-affirming care, fighting for reproductive rights, agitating for climate justice, combatting stochastic terror and opposing state violence, which will surely escalate under this neo-fascism era.

I end with several provocations/questions:

  1. While important, we need more than study sessions, affinity groups, and mutual aid. At the same time, politicization can/should be happening in these aforementioned spaces. How do we move from volunteerism, merely reacting, and possible adventurism? How do we build/re-build a working class multi-racial, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement that subsumes the cynical and surface-based identity politics of the liberal bourgeois framework? While racism, queerphobia, sexism, and genocide apologism were not necessarily dealbreakers for many voters, it’s clear that these are not the only factors contributing to widespread disaffection and the embrace of reactionary politics.
  2. How do we need to engage the working class seriously, and that includes disillusioned liberals or even those who voted for the current regime who are receptive to an alternative anti-capitalist reality, and whose lives are about to become materially worse? I told you so’s, mocking peoples’ fears, or berating them with our so-called knowledge on the left isn’t who we should be — we have much to learn about listening and developing socio-cultural humility. Our analysis must be astute and we have to be serious about articulating humanizing alternatives.
  3. Our anti-imperialism and internationalism should also be principled, Trump’s fascist agenda might appear isolationist but it doesn’t part with neo-conservatism. We are likely to witness authoritarian leaders across the world lock arms with the Trump regime to enact (or continue) fascistic projects in their own nation-states. Here I caution against the blanket embrace, approval, or excuse of non-western states engaging in sub-imperialism which in our current time might look like Palestine-washing. Ayca Cubukcu provides a great definition and example here, “Palestine-washing, the effort by certain states, including Turkey, to pose as anti-colonial advocates of the oppressed championing Palestinian liberation on paper while carrying on colonial and oppressive policies of their own within and across their borders.” Opposing genocide in Gaza must be accompanied by similar opposition to the atrocities being perpetuated by states such as the UAE, Turkey, and Azerbaijan.
  4. A return to Marx: Understanding the mechanisms of capital itself is important but discussing every aspect of capitalist domination is also very important. Marx also demonstrates how the capitalist mode of production obscures human relations making them relations between things. At the center of this mode of production is alienation, the alienation of humans from their work, the alienation of humans from nature, and the alienation of humans from each other and themselves. For Black, Brown, Indigenous, and others, this alienation occurs doubly, as workers and as racialized beings. Our analysis of racialized, abled, gendered capitalism has to address the material and psycho-affective dimensions of alienation as should our on-the-ground discussions.

I conclude with the words of Nel Parcon an organizer with Migrante USA, San Fernando Valley, an organization that works with Filipino migrants.

“Trump’s rhetoric around immigration – including his threats to make mass deportation his first order of business – is concerning. The election is only every four years, but the problems that we see every day – it’s really a consistent thing we have to work alongside each other to help resolve.”

To that I say, every contradiction and the rage emanating from the peoples’ everyday experiences of exploitation, oppression, and death-making must be sharpened and weaponized into a revolt toward our collective liberation.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/school-vouchers-2024-election-trump

[2] https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/voters-seven-states-pass-measures-protect-abortion

[3] https://pluribusnews.com/news-and-events/voters-in-alaska-missouri-approve-minimum-wage-increase-to-15/

[4] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0brFB4wZzSGxLjoLv90tsq?si=_J6Om2e6S3ymA_YAmAh6Gg

[5]

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