Is MDC DSA Antifascist?
Why It’s Coming to a Vote on Sunday
Starting this Sunday, December 9, 2018, Metro DC DSA will have the opportunity to vote on Resolution 1: Supporting Antifascist Organizing within MDC DSA (R1). By voting yes for R1, we as an organization would simply say that we believe in the necessity of fighting fascism, and that we stand in solidarity with those doing so today. R1 does not obligate our chapter to take any specific action. It is a statement of values.
Although this may seem uncontroversial to many, we introduced R1 because members of our chapter have both publicly dismissed fascism as a legitimate threat and chosen to lend antifascist organizers only conditional support. We had to introduce R1 for consideration by the full General Body because it is not clear, in lieu of such a chapter-wide vote, that MDC DSA is willing to support antifascist organizing going forward.
Background
This problem began in mid-July of this year, when the chapter’s Steering Committee voted (3–6–0) against signing on to a broad coalition statement. The statement expressed solidarity with people who were violently attacked at Unite the Right (UTR) in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and it called for opposition to Unite the Right 2 (UTR2), set to take place in DC on August 12, 2018. Adding to the confusion was that just one week prior, in early July, the Steering Committee had voted (6–0–0, with three absences/non-votes) to endorse a member resolution resolving that “MDC DSA take on the organization of a non-violent mass rally and march against fascism in DC on August 12th.” When six members of Steering subsequently opposed signing onto the Shut It Down DC coalition statement, this sent a conflicting message about the chapter getting involved in August 12th (A12) organizing.
The vote exacerbated challenges that organizers within Metro DC DSA already working with the Shut It Down DC coalition faced in trying to pull off a mass rally on just over a month’s notice. A lack of consistent leadership and number of available comrades able to help with organizing for the A12 rally was compounded by miscommunication, and possibly mistrust, between both the organizers and the Steering Committee during the first weeks of organizing. (This certainly contributed to the fact that Metro DC DSA did not have a large, unified presence in attendance, despite being an organization of over 1,500 people at the time.)
While most Steering Committee members grounded their opposition to signing on to the coalition statement in concerns with organizers’ plans for security, member safety, and the overall A12 strategy, others voiced skepticism about working with organizations that appeared to be too radical for DSA (despite the fact that even a local chapter of Our Revolution had signed on). Another thought it best to avoid the action altogether.
Metro DC DSA’s Steering Committee did rightly condemn the fascists’ red carpet treatment on A12 by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) — complete with private Metro rail cars and a police escort — over the courageous whistleblowing and protest of WMATA’s operators union, ATU Local 689. Yet the fiery statement is hard to square with the unwillingness of the Steering Committee to sign onto the coalition statement.
These mixed signals and the chapter’s reactive posture are, in our opinion, part of a broader problem: Metro DC DSA lacks a coherent strategy on how to defeat fascism.
It is not clear that MDC DSA even views fascism to be a serious, credible, and immediate threat. In his public statement after the vote, Steering Committee member Rob W. said:
“I think counter-protests on August 12 will be irrelevant at best, and (much more likely) actively harmful at worst…. Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer are not the fascist squadrons of interwar Europe, violently crushing worker organization with the open support of big business, nor are they the Ku Klux Klan, assassinating civil rights leaders with the tacit approval of legal authorities. These people are not near the centers of power….”
We really wish that this were true. We wish that fascists operating in the US today were not seriously organizing themselves, and were not a threat. Unfortunately, even a cursory glance at the news over the past two years makes the serious threat posed by fascists undeniable, and impossible to ignore. Just as a few examples:
- The President of the United States winked at Nazis’ murder of Heather Heyer and grievous bodily injury to DeAndre Harris and more than a dozen other comrades in Charlottesville, in “a bellwether for conservative acceptance of neofascist alt-right violence.”
- Nazis, including Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson, are openly running for state and federal office in record numbers.
- The Republican Party has acquired its very own blackshirts in the Proud Boys — nine of whom the NYPD only reluctantly arrested for October 13 mob violence after antifascist organizers did all their investigative work for them (in a repeat of behavior we saw from Charlottesville PD last year).
- Proud Boys members have been discovered working as sheriff’s deputies in Louisiana and Oregon. (Though the FBI first warned police departments 12 years ago that white supremacists deliberately infiltrated law enforcement in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit new ones, no action has been taken to screen would-be personnel for supremacist ties.)
- The Portland Police Bureau told no one about finding Patriot Prayer members with rifles on a roof above the August 4 “Gibson for Senate Freedom March” (until they accidentally let it slip to Portland’s mayor in October).
- Atomwaffen Division, which has murdered at least five people, is full of active and former US military personnel (not that the DoD, DHS, or FBI is interested in looking).
- The Base, a network of white separatist paramilitaries training to commit acts of mass violence, is led by ex-military and currently has at least one member on active deployment to the U.S.-Mexico border to confront the migrant caravan.
- The President said in November that antifascists “better hope that the other side doesn’t mobilize. Because if you look, the other side, it’s the military. It’s the police.”
The state consistently, “willingly turn[s] the other way on white supremacy because there [are] real political costs to talking about white supremacy.” It is important not to separate the threats posed to vulnerable people — and that includes just about all of us in one form or another — by state actors and the threats posed by law enforcement, paramilitary organizations, and the reactionary communities that embrace them. Fascism requires all of these and, to effectively fight it, we need to understand how these threats, posed by both state and non-state actors, complement and reinforce each other.
Last month, the New York Times released a shocking piece detailing the President’s frontal assault on the rights of all queer and transgender people. Decreeing sex assigned at birth to be the only valid recognition of gender identity, our head of state has taken action to erase transgender people’s existence. The President’s justification is that his predecessor “wrongfully extend[ed] civil rights protections to people who should not have them” — LGBTQIA+ people. This rhetoric is openly genocidal. It invites violence.
The point of Trump’s pronouncement is not just to subvert federal protections for queer and transgender individuals. It is to instruct federal, state, and local institutions that the federal government won’t go after them for failing to protect these vulnerable populations, to signal to law enforcement that they don’t need to prosecute anyone for violence against these groups (and that their own violence targeting these groups will be overlooked), and to bestow tacit permission for vigilante attacks from reactionary members of the public. This has worked. Just last week, three staff members at Osseo Senior High School in Minnesota were filmed forcibly unlocking and barging into the restroom stall a trans teen was using. This is a textbook example of fascism being practiced by both state and non-state actors, complementing and reinforcing each other’s efforts in the process.
Trump has been in office for just under two years, and this is not the first time he has gone after the civil rights of trans people. In March, he took action to bar trans people from the military. This latest attack demonstrates an escalating pattern of aggression against an already marginalized and frequently victimized group. The President first named an enemy. Then he quietly invited violence against them. Next, he will openly invite violence. This is the process of dehumanization, and it is part of the move toward a genocidal framework of governance, i.e. fascism. Fascism is a necessary step in any effort to restore a patriarchal and white supremacist society that reactionaries view as slipping away from them, and it’s developing in the United States right now.
As Umberto Eco reminds us: “the first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.” And that appeal is made to a reactionary, “frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” It targets the most vulnerable on its way to coming for all of us: fascism is “the machinery by which the ruling class reaches beyond the bounds of bourgeois democracy to eliminate any threat to its power, crushing the left and all movements for working class liberation.”
The Need for Resolution 1
Resolution 1 asks Metro DC DSA if we agree, as a body, that fascism must be defeated. This resolution does not obligate the chapter to act. It sets a very low bar of putting ourselves on the record as to whether we collectively believe opposing fascism is necessary, and are in fact an antifascist organization.
With this resolution, we ask that MDC DSA take a vital first step towards standing in true solidarity with our comrades who are most immediately and deeply impacted by fascist state and non-state violence: people of color, immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ folks, Jewish folks, women, and many others. We believe MDC DSA should voice, unequivocally and for all to hear, that none of these overlapping communities — none of our comrades in the struggle — are expendable.
Further, it is not clear that MDC DSA has grappled with the fact that fascist violence is unavoidable. Again from Steering Committee member Rob W.:
“The DSA members who are trying to organize the counter-protests for the August 12 rally came to the the last local steering committee meeting to talk about their plans. They told us that the organizers of the rally are quite open that they hope to provoke leftists into violent confrontations so that we get arrested and our organizing gets bogged down in dealing with the legal repercussions. Given that many leading figures in the ‘alt-right’ began their careers as internet trolls, this strategy is no surprise. Given our own lack of effective discipline in the streets, and the predisposition of law enforcement to crack down on leftists, it strikes me as a good plan to throw a wrench into our work. The people who want to confront the rally brought this point up, but it actually seems like a powerful argument against showing up at all. If we know that this rally is a trap, why walk into it?”
This sentiment closely echoes what we heard from our Steering Committee’s counterpart in Philadelphia last month, which chose to hold a General Meeting to conduct voting/regular business the same day fascists put on a “We the People” rally in Independence National Park. This took place three weeks to the day after 11 people were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, both for being Jewish and for organizing to provide sanctuary to refugees (referred to by white supremacist murderer Robert Bowers as “invaders”).
Even aside from the ill-considered decision to put hundreds of DSA members in the position of sitting ducks inside a church (rather than simply rescheduling a quarterly meeting), Philly DSA’s Steering increased the risk of fascist violence faced by its most vulnerable comrades by refusing solidarity with antifascist organizers. Dismissing the fascists as powerless “far-right LARPers,” it dangerously mischaracterized the point of these public gatherings, saying “their aim is to interfere with our focus…. We shouldn’t be distracted by their theatrics…. Our vision and our organization are the best weapons against the xenophobia, misogyny, and racism of the far-right.”
But as we’ve discussed, fascists’ aim is genocide. It is being abetted at the highest levels of the US government, and things are getting worse every week. It is a highly, untenably, absurdly privileged position to believe that public gatherings of fascists in cities across this country are a “distraction from real work” and can safely be ignored. It is deeply callous, foolish, and misguided to pretend as though violence, whether from the state or authoritarian paramilitary groups, is a rare punctuation of the news cycle and not a constant, omnipresent, and existential threat. Our LGBTQIA+ comrades, comrades of color, and comrades from non-Christian faith traditions (including many of us, the authors of this article) do not possess this luxury.
In Philly on November 17 as well as in DC on August 12, a broad, loose coalition of antifascist organizers — with much less support than they should have received from the cities’ respective DSA chapters — put in work on short notice and marshalled the numbers needed to pull off a successful counter rally. In both cases, antifascist organizers got more of a helping hand from the media — titillated by the possibility of street fighting as in Charlottesville at the first UTR — than from DSA. The media spread the word and bolstered even #Resistance liberals’ determination to turn out en masse.
Liberals too have gotten the memo that numbers are what keep us safe, by letting the fascists know in no uncertain terms we will not let them attack and terrorize the most vulnerable among us. But for those of us without a mass media platform, it takes work and commitment, and relationship-building in our communities, to ensure we have the numbers. We cannot count on this kind of luck each time. We risk another Unite The Right.
We can’t speak to the experience of our comrades in Philly, but the deeply disappointing public statements of MDC DSA Steering Committee members referenced above, as well as the conflicting messages sent by contradictory Steering Committee votes, has left other Left organizations in DC baffled and uncertain of the reliability of DSA in the ongoing struggle to keep fascists off our streets and from the halls of power. The counter-protest to UTR2 demonstrated what we can achieve when we stand together. Let’s not make it so hard to do so.
Our city spent $2.6 million to protect fascists and flood our streets with cops, while our elected officials claim poverty when it comes to funding vital programs like caring for homeless kids. For a predominantly cishet, white, and male organization like DSA to stand aside and let our more vulnerable neighbors bear the increased risk of retaliatory police violence the fascists bring with them, we must realize we’ve painted ourselves as untrustworthy at best. In a historically Black city like Washington, DC, beset by an influx of white gentrifiers incentivized to disrupt community ties rather than build them, it would not even be unfair if DSA was perceived as actually dangerous.
Thus, we believe it is imperative that Metro DC DSA build solidarity with the larger antifascist community in the DMV and in the mid-Atlantic region. This must include respecting the autonomy, strategic vision, and tactics adopted by each group as appropriate for its own members, and seeking to organize toward collective aims in parallel, where direct collaboration is not possible, with the full range of groups working on the Left. We should not undermine other groups who are fighting fascism. There is no “good protester” vs. “bad protester” divide. Leave it to the liberals to separate the respectable and tolerable protestors from the uncivil and uncouth. We should know better.
We appreciate the MDC DSA Steering Committee members who did vote (consistently) for solidarity, and ask them to continue pushing the committee to center solidarity in the chapter’s organizing. There is of course the longer-term project of MDC DSA rank-and-file actually showing up regularly in antifascist spaces and building trust with organizers who have been doing the work for years or decades. But today we’re simply asking the chapter to take a small first step, by choosing to define ourselves, as an organization, in opposition to fascism.
Towards a Long-Term Strategy for Fighting Fascism
Finally, it is also not clear that Metro DC DSA has a solid understanding of how fascism can be defeated. A final take from MDC DSA Steering Committee member Rob W.:
“By showing up we also help them get in the media: A12 is likely to muster a pathetic handful of marginal losers who will get more attention than they deserve because they provoke a massive spectacle in response. A counter-protest is part of their communications strategy.”
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascist politics and their methods of recruitment. While spectacle and media attention can be unexpectedly positive for fascist recruiting in the right circumstances, the appearance of strength is of paramount importance in fascist politics. When we turn out in opposition, it convinces many of the fascists’ potential recruits to stay home or ditch the movement entirely, and a weak showing has a suppressive effect on fascists’ ability to draw greater numbers in the future.
The critical history to remember here is that there were less than 300 people at the first meeting the Fasci Italiani di combattimento(*) in 1919, but they faced very little counteraction. Three years later, when former journalist and MI5 agent Benito Mussolini marched on Rome with roughly 30,000 blackshirts, the King of Italy installed him as Prime Minister. If we do not understand how Mussolini achieved his meteoric rise to power, we will doom ourselves to repeat catastrophe.
Believing that responding to the threats posed by fascist organizing will galvanize fascist recruiting is ahistorical; it is putting our heads in the sand and ceding ground by inaction that gives fascism the space it needs to grow. They all start small, and that is precisely the time when it is most effective to strike at them.
It’s also important to note that antifascism neither starts nor ends in direct action in the streets to defend communities in shows of strength against roving fascist gangs. This is usually the last step in civil society of antifascist work. The escalation past that point involves meeting fascists down the barrel of a gun.
Antifascist work starts much earlier, in attempting to dismantle fascist organizing such that the fascists never manage a show of strength in the streets to begin with. Most antifascist organizing focuses on making our communities safer by engaging in the intelligence gathering work of infiltration and espionage against fascist groups to: (1) dox their members and expose them to their communities and workplaces in the hopes that they are ostracized and fired, (2) sow discord and in-fighting between their members, and (3) inform efforts to ensure sufficient counter-strength is mobilized against their activities to keep them suppressed. It is the hard work of antifascist organizers to effectively de-platform and publicly humiliate fascists like Jason Kessler that directly led to his supporters’ showing at UTR2 to be but a fraction of what we saw in Charlottesville the previous August 12.
Autonomous and diffuse, complementary and constant, pressure from antifascist activists sounding the alarm about the Proud Boys, doxxing their members, and infiltrating their spaces had already put a strain on founder Gavin McInnes’ recruitment efforts before he was forced to renounce the group last month. This unheralded and largely unseen antifascist work highlighting the Proud Boys’ penchant for violence may have put sufficient pressure on the FBI to acknowledge, in the relative privacy of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, that the Proud Boys are an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. (The FBI is now regretting that the contents of that conversation have been made public.)
In the eloquent words of “Murray,” a Baltimore-based antifascist organizer interviewed in Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook:
“You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.”
Ultimately, fascist organizing must be constantly disrupted, because fascists cannot be allowed to have functioning organizations (paramilitary formations) in place when the opportunity to commit genocide inevitably appears — say, when climate catastrophe forces unprecedented levels of global migration.
Antifascist organizers who have tirelessly opposed the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and their ilk in recent years have, at considerable personal risk to themselves, often refocused the fascists’ anger away from our most vulnerable comrades and onto themselves. We believe we have a moral responsibility to stand with them and publicly counter the voices, conservative and liberal alike, that attempt to falsely equate antifascists with those who seek to eliminate us from the earth.
In solidarity,
Metro DC DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus
This article is also individually co-signed by:
MDC DSA Comrades:
Aaron M.
Arjun Comar
Brian D.
Caleb-Michael Files
Conor Arpwel
Craig T.
Erin M.
Francesco
James M.
Kaiser F.
Kim Lehmkuhl
Matthew Sampson
Max Socol
Michelle S.
Tom McIntire
Topher L.
Zach E.
Other Affiliations:
Andy Moskowitz, Philly DSA
Eric, DSA member-at-large
sus v, Philly DSA
NB: If you’d like to co-sign this piece, either to support the chapter resolution or to endorse its antifascist message, leave a comment below. Include how you’d like your name to be displayed and please note if you’re a member of MDC DSA or another chapter/organizing committee/at-large.
A good comrade in Charlottesville notes that in addition to the emotional trauma they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives, many of the survivors of Nazi James Alex Fields’ horrific attack last August have ongoing medical needs and bills. You can donate to the Healing Charlottesville fund to help.
(*) This is the original nucleus of fascists that would eventually become the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in 1921. Fascism, historically, in Italy, Germany, and Spain, did not come about as a fully-formed mass movement with a very large popular base. They only became truly mass movements after they gained power.
