Fascism or Revolution? Two Trends on Campus and in Society
This article is written by an SCDS member who attended and helped organize the Stand Up, Fight Back! protest against Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys in 2022. Read the full Fall 2024 SCDS Dis-Orientation Guide here.
Over the last few years, far-right and fascist organizers have attempted to use our campus for recruiting and fundraising events. This has raised much discussion from all quarters and given a great impulse to revolutionary organizing here. The most prominent example of this was when the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, was invited by reactionary students to come speak in 2022, making national headlines. While students organized and mobilized to successfully shut down McInnes’s appearance, the problem is larger than just him. Having a correct analysis of this recurring phenomenon, then, is essential to eliminate the influence of fascism at Penn State.
Fascist Organizing at Penn State
Other right-wing charlatans and influencers such as Alex Stein, Riley Gaines, and Milo Yiannopoulos have been brought to campus recently as well. These are not just harmless visits from “comedians” or an innocent exercise of “free speech” — there is a pipeline from conservative and reactionary student organizations to militant fascist organizations like the Proud Boys being constructed right before our eyes. The point of these “speakers” coming to campus is to recruit young activists into their organizations and form lifelong, committed fascists.
Of course, this trajectory is not unique to the far right. Organizations of all political backgrounds use college campuses as a place to train and develop future members and cadre. This is because colleges are places where young people often are coming into their own for the first time, developing a political understanding of the world around them. Fascists seek to pull people into their violent street gangs. The Democratic and Republican Parties are looking for interns and staffers who might eventually rise up through the ranks. And revolutionaries try to connect with those who want to serve the people and fight all forms of oppression and exploitation.
Administrators Side with Fascists and Against Revolutionaries
Penn State Administrators are not neutral bystanders in this political process. In order to facilitate McInnes’s event and protect him and his reactionary followers, they hired an estimated 300 cops from the local, state, and federal levels. Protesters on the ground encountered not just ordinary patrol officers, but also riot cops, K-9 units, mounted police, an armored vehicle, and even snipers on the roof of Eisenhower Parking Deck. Police “did nothing” as McInnes supporters attacked students with bear mace. (1) As a last resort, the police declared the protest an unlawful assembly to try and disperse it, which students bravely and righteously defied, leading to the cancellation of McInnes’s event. These paper tiger police were dealt a tactical defeat due to the organization and militancy of the students despite all their advanced weaponry.
At the same time, Administrators have consistently harassed and attempted to repress the political activities of revolutionary students, especially SCDS. You can hardly call one of our protests a success if former FBI counter-terrorism specialist and current Vice President for Student Affairs Danny Shaha isn’t lurking around the corner or behind a tree trying to take pictures and get the names of activists. In April of this year, Penn State bike cops protected the complicit “Applied Research Laboratory” from protesters who want to end Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people and Penn State’s involvement in it. (2) State College police, which work hand-in-glove with University Park police, also keep tabs on the revolutionary community organization People’s Defense Front. (3)
These examples are a far cry from how police have repeatedly defended fascist organizers on our campus at Administrators’ direction. We point this out not because we want the police to protect us — quite the opposite. We recognize that the police objectively serve the interests of the ruling class. And seeing how revolutionaries oppose the ruling class and work to overthrow it, this antagonism with the police only makes sense.
Imperialism and Fascism
To this point, Penn State is an institution run by the ruling imperialist class. Its Trustees are business executives, landlords, and politicians who live like vampires off the labor of workers, students, and tenants. More information on this can be found in the article “A Basic Political Economy of Penn State.” As it relates to this current article, it means that Penn State will always be generally aligned with the Democratic and Republican Parties which alternate control of the state and federal government. Penn State, after all, is a “state-related” school.
As a ruling class institution, Penn State attempts to curb the local revolutionary movement by supporting reactionary and fascist forces. Of course, the vast majority, if not all, of the Administrators and Trustees of Penn State themselves are not fascists (though some may have ideological sympathies). The thing is, when fascists are in the streets attacking revolutionaries and progressive people, doing work that complements the police’s, the ruling class will choose the “lesser of two evils” and support the fascists. Revolutionary action by the masses is the only force that is truly and consistently opposed to our imperialist system, and for this reason Administrators and the rest of the local ruling class will side with fascists, even as they have certain disagreements with them. Why else would Administrators spend so much university money and resources to protect Gavin McInnes against a few hundred anti-fascist students when Administrators stated how McInnes’s beliefs contradicted Penn State’s core values?
This process is a microcosm of what is happening across the United States. It is emblematic of the general crisis of imperialism, monopoly capitalism on its deathbed. As revolutionary forces gather, consolidate, and grow, fascist forces assemble to work in tandem with the police, the FBI, and the CIA to prevent revolutionary change in society. The ruling class is willing to deploy any given tactic in particular circumstances, ranging from inclusivity and cooptation one day, to arrests and assassinations the next.
Democrats, Republicans, and fascists all agree on maintaining our imperialist system, but they have disagreements on the most effective way of doing so. Democrats and Republicans want to retain the current structure of the state, with elections and a relative degree of freedom of speech (which is hypocritically denied to revolutionaries) despite policy differences, while fascists want to do away with the whole democratic edifice and make openly apparent what the state fundamentally is: the repressive apparatus that capitalists and imperialists wield against workers and oppressed people. This difference is a matter of appearance and intensity — they are not two different political systems. When imperialism is threatened by revolution, it deploys fascism; when it achieves a relative degree of stability, the state becomes more “democratic.” But we must always ask the question: democratic for which class?
Fascism or Revolution?
Students must recognize that the fight against fascism is the fight for revolution. These fights are impossible to separate because fascism and revolution are two trends in society that are in direct struggle against each other. This applies not just on our campus, but in the US as a whole. Revolutionaries and their sympathizers have to realize that the ruling class has the ability to weaken our movement if we make mistakes and are careless. At the same time, if we apply revolutionary theory correctly, mobilize the masses, and develop the corresponding forms of organization, revolution becomes an unstoppable force that wipes away even the most reactionary and fascist elements in society. The experience of Penn State students protesting against McInnes in 2022 is just one small battle between revolutionary and reactionary forces that is in many ways a practice round for larger conflicts to come.
Read the full Fall 2024 SCDS Dis-Orientation Guide here.
Sources
- “‘They did nothing’ | Penn State students, protesters gather in opposition of Uncensored America event” (October 24, 2022):
https://www.psucollegian.com/news/they-%20did-nothing-penn-state-students-protesters-gather-in-opposition-of-uncensored-%20america-event/article_53ab3752%e2%80%93540c-11ed-8e6d-87622ca72dd1.html - “Report Back: Centre County May Day 2024” (May 4, 2024):
https://medium.com/@embernews/report-back-centre-county-may-day-2024-2f0933b4d383 - “SCPD and UP Display Racism at Palestine Protests” (March 3, 2024):
https://medium.com/@embernews/scpd-and-up-display-racism-at-palestine-protests-cac60d220e34
