defeating fascism requires more than ideas

Tom Frome
Tom Frome
Aug 27, 2017 · 6 min read

This article is a response to this one.

Antifa’s critics are always reminding us of the need for “strategy”. The image they want to project is one of seriousness, maturity, a stoic restraint in the face of the sexy allure of direct action. But what is strategy? A strategy is a story about the future in which we achieve our goals. It’s a good strategy if it’s believable, if it’s neither too simplistic nor overly complex, if it adequately addresses the obstacles we’re most likely to run into, and especially if it offers useful advice here and now, that is, if it offers us ways to participate in the story.

People like Nathan Robinson, Freddie deBoer, and Angela Nagle, those critics of antifa who always have “strategy” on their lips, have no actual strategy. Instead they offer a deontological injunction: dialogue. These people are not hard-headed realists; they’re moralists. They are scandalized by violence, happy to assume that everyone else feels the same way (and always will), and blithely self-assured when they inform us that we must build a movement around appealing to the “public opinion” they’ve hallucinated. At the same time, they will gladly scold the public that really exists insofar as it deviates from their scheme.

Professional pundits almost by definition cannot have a revolutionary strategy, since such a strategy must be the outcome of collective deliberation and is premised on the existence of a party. Pundits can tell stories that are utterly implausible; they can tell one story today and another tomorrow; they can flout their own avowed strategies; all without serious consequence. Where there is no accountability to one’s comrades, there is no need to do the hard work of fleshing out the signifier “strategy”. Its empty husk can then be used as a club to beat the actually strategic left.

This latter consists, in the US, of groups like the PSL, the WWP, the IWW and (to a lesser extent) the DSA, all of which show up to antifa actions because it is simply good politics. Antifa is not the revolution, and it’s unreasonable to expect it to be — debates aren’t the revolution either, but left scolds seem happy enough to endorse them. The list of things antifa does accomplish, though, is substantial:

  1. The Left is the most credible enemy of fascism, but more people oppose fascism than oppose capitalism. If the Left shows up to punch Nazis, then we stand a chance of turning unaffiliated anti-fascists into socialists/anarchists/communists. Failing this, we still build credibility with those communities who are most threatened by fascism, who (not coincidentally) also happen to be the communities with the greatest revolutionary potential.
  2. It calls attention to the fact of social antagonism. Liberal common sense absolutely hates this, preferring to paint us all as sharing the same basic interests, only occasionally suffering minor differences of opinion that can always be resolved by peaceful dialogue.
  3. Left unity is catalyzed by a common enemy (except for the scolds, who feel left out).
  4. Street actions encourage tactical discipline — although I’m sure the scolds would balk at the idea of “party discipline”, it is an urgent necessity to which the American Left is deeply unaccustomed.
  5. Left visibility is always good as long as the coverage is not outright demonization. The events of Charlottesville let antifa-sympathizers dominate the news cycle for several days on both conventional and social media. A spate of thinkpieces on law, violence, white supremacy and their interrelation (like this one) helped illuminate basic leftist positions for those still questioning.
  6. Antifa disincentivizes fascist rallies and hinders fascist organizing.

In what strategy, I wonder, is all of this to be sneezed at? But you see, neither Nathan Robinson nor any of his kind will provide an answer. They don’t tell stories about the future, they only tell stories about the present — and, occasionally, what might have been. Take this unverifiable counterfactual of Robinson’s:

“Yiannopoulos might have dwelt in permanent obscurity had the Left simply ignored him.”

This is, my God, pure ideology. For those of us who think that capitalist crises are a breeding ground for reactionary ideas, it is ridiculous. The people who responded positively to Milo did not do so because he was “victimized” by antifa; these people hate victims and love strength. They responded to his message because both they and Milo are fucking Nazis. The dude himself is not what we have to worry about; the movement is.

“For the Left, this approach [of shutting down right-wing speakers] has been a public relations disaster.”

Um, citation needed. What sort of temperature-check could we do that would empirically confirm or refute this hypothesis? How many people are more sympathetic to leftist direct action now than they were eight months ago? How many people are more radicalized? How many people have joined Left organizations? I would bet that all those numbers are up. Is the liberal commentariat concern trolling harder now than ever? Of course they are. That’s their one trick. This does not constitute a “public relations disaster” unless the only people you hang out with are members of the liberal commentariat.

“Next, the trouble with supporting any amount of “no-platforming” is that nearly every justification for the tactic also justifies massive additional curtailments.”

The slippery-slope argument is stock-in-trade of the reactionary right. I am perfectly fine endorsing the principle “Any time a huge crowd gathers to oppose someone’s speaking, such that only a high degree of police repression can allow the event to go forward, it should probably not go forward.” This has some pretty obvious built-in limitations — if you’ve ever tried to convoke a large crowd of people, you know it’s not easy. Only people that sufficiently arouse the community’s anger will earn the community’s veto.

“If there is no actual rule or principle in place, what will determine who is too problematic to speak?”

Again: the people will. What we observe in Robinson’s article is a basic skepticism (we might even say hostility) towards the judgment of large crowds. This cannot be read as anything other than a Tocquevillian anxiety about democracy, or “the tyranny of the majority”.

“Finally, one popular notion on the Left has it that allowing right-wing speakers on campus “legitimizes” them and subscribes to the illusion that racists can be vanquished through public debate. The fear here is that if racists were permitted to be part of the public discourse, they would win. I have far more confidence in the persuasive power of left-wing ideas.”

I can understand the appeal, for people who are likely to be invited to debate racists, of let’s-debate-the-racists. But this is a cartoon image of how politics works. Racists don’t need to convince everybody to win. As George Ciccariello-Maher has said, “We didn’t argue our way into white supremacy and slavery, we’re not going to argue our way out of white supremacy.” White supremacy works regardless of whether people believe in it. The Left can persuade 90% of people and still be utterly powerless.

The unstated premise here is that we win by convincing the majority that our ideas are better. I believe this goal has already been largely achieved. The problem is that we do not live in a democracy. Public opinion doesn’t write policy and doesn’t direct the exercise of state violence. People like Robinson believe that we can reach the levers of power without violence, through debate, behind the backs or over the heads of the police — eliding the need to ever challenge their monopoly on violence. But the police are there precisely to prevent us ever getting our hands on power. Ideas, in other words, don’t do shit. People do (when they are inflamed by ideas), but those people are not made invincible or victorious by the strength of their ideas. They’re made victorious by organization, that is, their ability to work together to change the world, to do things differently.

“The Left will lose in a battle of physical force because it has the smallest force, but will win at a battle of ideas because it has the best ideas.”

At this point it should be obvious what kind of belief system we’re dealing with: it’s just liberalism, folks. What kind of Marxist believes that winning “a battle of ideas” is decisive in history? What kind of Marxist thinks that the so-called marketplace of ideas rewards good ideas, or that the field of politics resembles a level playing field? What kind of Marxist thinks politics is basically a contest between equals for the adoration of the masses? What kind of Marxist thinks “nonviolence” is possible, that it isn’t just a way of whitewashing the violence of a state you don’t feel like confronting? These are harmful ideological relics of a bygone age. Good strategy demands we abandon them.

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Tom Frome

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stalinist-feminist philistine vandal. π is wrong.

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