NYC-DSA Antifascists Points of Unity
*NYC-DSA Antifascists aims to be a conduit and focal point for the shared struggle against the far right and fascism in New York City.
Colonialism and the Imperial Core
*NYC-DSA Antifascists organize in an imperial core city, in a colonized land, so called “New York City,” the land of the Canarsie, the Rockaway, the Matinecock, the Wappinger, the Munsee and the Lenape.
*NYC-DSA Antifascists recognizes that so-called “New York City’’ and the so-called “United States of America’’ are racist, white supremacist colonial projects that must be dismantled and decolonized to prevent a full fledged fascist horizon.
What Are Fascism and Antifascism
*Antifascism is a movement of liberation; it seeks to not just prevent or combat fascism, but to abolish capitalism and settler colonialism, the only soil in which fascism can grow.
*With the recent multi-racial uprising for the liberation of Black lives and the violent police riots to injure, intimidate, incarcerate and kill those whom the capitalist state perceives as a threat to its status quo, it is apparent that this is an authoritarian moment that has opened the prospect of a fascist horizon.
*Fascism is a revolutionary right wing movement that seeks to annihilate and liquidate all working class institutions in their entirety. Examples of working class institutions include unions, the press, lawyers, religious institutions and all forms of creative artistic expression.
*Fascist grouplets are only able to take state power when there is — or the ruling class perceives — a left revolutionary challenge to capitalist hegemony. If the revolutionary left is unable to be contained by typical capitalist state repression, a fascist regime will be seen as an acceptable tool to restore order.
*Fascist movements will often attempt to divide and co-opt the rightful antagonism of the multiracial working class against capital in these times of crisis. These movements scapegoat the vulnerable and marginalized, diverting revolutionary energy away from class enemies and toward even greater violence than the capitalist system already perpetrates upon our working, poor and marginalized siblings every day. When Malcolm X said “you can’t have capitalism without racism,” it included the conceit that capitalism cannot be defended, upheld and maintained without the division of bigotry. Fascist brutality against marginalized groups is the acceleration of existing, intrinsic tendencies within the capitalist system.
What Is To Be Done
*Socialism and class liberation is the only available and effective avenue for defeating fascism. Liberalism, while having an initial distaste for fascists, will eventually turn to them to protect their class interests — which necessarily include crushing the left and perpetuating capitalism’s systemic violence.
*A contemporary fascist regime would be a catastrophic failure of morality leading to the extermination of entire ethnic and racial identities. A fascist regime would lead to further catastrophic destruction via climate change. Protecting the natural world through ecosocialism is an end in itself of antifascism. Eco-Fascism is a distinct horizon NYC-DSA Antifascists must organize against.
*In the event of a fascist regime gaining power, political repression would be enormous and lethal. Socialist organizations, quite likely including the NYC-DSA, would become enemies of the state. As students of history, we know fascists would seek to eliminate members of socialist organizations through tactics including incarceration, violence, professional retaliation [blacklisting] and deportation. NYC-DSA Antifascists seeks to prevent this horizon, while also planning to remain operational in the event of this dreadful outcome.
*NYC-DSA Antifascists are police and prison abolitionists. Municipal and federal police departments, as well as prisons, detention centers and all forms of confinement, are the main agents of current capitalist state repression. The path to working class liberation lies through disarming and abolishing the police.
*The ideological underpinnings of U.S. capitalism are liberalism and conservatism. The liberation of the working class entails an abandonment of these ideologies for the liberatory class struggle toward socialism. Liberalism is not only inadequate, but it is used to justify the contradictions of a class society and rejects the need for an end to it. Antifascism must not only reject liberalism, but a central task of the antifascist movement will be implementing a rigorous course of political education. Confronting and unlearning the exploitation that is at the heart of life under capitalism is the task of political education. A course of study should cover not only ideological and tactical concerns, but it should also lay the foundation for a Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal to address the crimes of capitalism and rectify their effects.
How Fascism Aims to Divide Us
*Just as the capitalist nation-state utilizes border control as a tool of working class repression, the capitalist-state further uses a type of border to reduce bodily autonomy. Border-like restrictions on bodily autonomy and reproductive choice are often severely applied to the most vulnerable members of the working class: racial and ethnic minorities and the disabled. A border-like restriction is further delineated around a person’s time. Commodification of survival requires the working class to toil under wage labor. Antifascism seeks to remove these borders on land, body and time. For the far right and fascism to be truly defeated, the capitalist nation-state, as such, must be abolished.
*White supremacy is the foundation of racial capitalism and the cornerstone of the far right and fascism. As such, white identifying comrades must work to dismantle their ingrained racial prejudices and racial identities. Further, the very concept of white racial identity is unsalvageable and must be abolished for working class liberation.
*White supremacists want to encourage and uplift white women’s reproductive capacity while controlling women of color’s reproduction. Fascism is built on the foundation of the patriarchal family. Antifascism must work within a framework of reproductive justice, the organizing theory pioneered by Sister Song and other women-of-color-led groups, to acknowledge that reproductive freedom is the right to have or not have children, and to raise children in safe and healthy environments where families are materially supported. Bodily autonomy and reproductive justice are foundational to working-class liberation and thus to antifascism. Further, the nuclear family under capitalism is a site of control and violence. In a liberated society, child care work will be supported by the collective community. The nuclear family, as such, will be abolished. Family relations, now fully reimagined, will not be sites of coercion and repression, but will be instead free from material dependency and entered into joyfully.
*The COVID-19 pandemic and the violent police tactics used during the 2020 uprisings will leave a lasting mark on the population. Many will be managing chronic physical or mental health problems, including addiction. Additionally, the history of fascism tells us that the disabled (perceived as “unfit” under eugenicist mindsets) are often among the first groups targeted for violence. For this reason and others, radical defense by and of the disabled is a priority of antifascism. We recognize that physical and mental ability and disability are socially constructed under capitalism, and we are working toward a horizon where health is valued for its own sake rather than as an indicator of the ability to produce.
*Fascism relies on the unit of the patriarchal family and, in many cases, on normative masculinity. Queer people represent a threat to fascism’s power and are targeted by its tactics. Antifascism seeks the liberation of all sexualities and genders and recognizes all sexuality as a creative expression.
Conclusion
*Antifascism will become anachronistic when fascism and class society has been eradicated and communism has triumphed. Only then will the full flowering of our species-being commence in its infinitude.
