The need for solidarity between leftist movements

First They Came

I’m sure nearly every leftist has already heard the famous poem First They Came, but just in case, let’s go over it again:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I feel like everyone only remembers the last two verses of this poem. The first three verses aren’t actually groups like “the Jews”. Judaism is a religion and a closely related ethnicity, something that people don’t normally choose. We all understand that there’s something deeply wrong about killing people for how they were born. But nobody’s born a trade unionist. So why does it say communists, socialists, and trade unionists instead of something someone is born as? Why not gays, or disabled people?

The poem lists groups united by a common cause instead of a common identity first, because that’s what happened. And it happened because it’s smart. If I were a Nazi, I wouldn’t start out by targeting jewish, gay, and disabled people. Because there’s a greater chance that your average moderate will see the problem with that. And because if you go after the minority identities, the leftists are going to band together to stop you.

See, leftists intrinsically have an interest in protecting vulnerable people. That’s what makes them leftists. Even if the only group that leftist cares about is the workers, they’ll still make trouble for you should you go after the workers. But what happens if you go after the leftists first? Well, some jewish, gay, and disabled people will care and do something to stop you. But those people are already leftists. The leftists aren’t getting reinforced by the moderate jewish, gay, or disabled people. The moderates are minding their own business, just like the poem says.

And we see this same pattern play out in the modern day with Zionist fascism. The European, American, and Australian media is not villifying Palestinians on the basis of identity in the same way that Israel itself does. World leaders such as Joe Biden are actually claiming to have sympathy for the Palestinian victims of genocide. But the police and media crackdowns are coming hard at leftist groups, like the student encampments. They don’t care if the student encampments contain Palestinians, it’s irrelevant to the propaganda. The propaganda only needs to say that the leftists are irrational, violent antisemites. The propaganda attacks belief and action, not identity.

And this isn’t the case in Israel, where Zionist fascism has advanced further. We hear Israeli politicians saying that every single child in Gaza is an enemy combatant. We hear them calling Palestinians animals. But in the moderate west, they do not go after identity, they go after people who choose to support Palestine. That’s the propaganda strategy.

First They Came contains a warning about the fascist strategy. They will not go after the racially marginalised first. They’re smarter than that. They want to divide and conquer. They go after the smallest and most isolated leftist movement first, and then proceed to the next target after each layer of defence goes down. First the communists, the most extreme. Then the socialists, who suddenly find themselves the new most extreme. Then the trade unionists. And only when the entire leftist movement is destroyed, do they openly go after the minorities. If they’d gone after the trade unionists first, the socialists and communists would have banded together with the trade unionists and stopped them. They have to go after the most isolated first.

What First They Came is telling us, is that if you’re a member of a potentially vulnerable minority in any way, you need to form an alliance with the communists, or you’ll be genocided by fascists.

And they actually taught us this shit in schools! Man, sometimes I can’t believe how much radicalising propaganda we were exposed to in public school. Maybe it was just the school I went to, but damn, you actually start paying attention to what you learned in those classrooms and suddenly you realise you’d been consuming communist propaganda your whole life. Damn.

Critical Theory Of Everything

Racist systems turn innocent intentions into racist actions. That’s the basis of critical race theory. Such ideas can also be found in intersectional feminism, and just about every movement for minority rights. If you’re disabled, you probably know how an ableist society encourages passive ablesim. If you’re queer, you know about how the heteropatriarchy grooms children to accept heterosexual identity as the default, making all of our lives harder. Et cetera, et cetera.

So, if you exist in society as a white or white passing person, your existence will be politicised by conservatives to oppress people of colour. If you’re neurotypical, same deal. Same if you’re a man, same if you’re cis, ad omnia. That’s why there’s no such thing as an apolitical existence. That’s why we have a duty to say “not in our name”. If there is a single person in the world who is capable of living apolitically, xe is a nonbinary quadriplegic graysexual biromantic half black, quarter latine, quarter polynesian, autistic, AFAB, schizophrenic jewish-convert turbo-marginsalised person. And do you think xe is a political centrist? Hell no! So the rest of us have absolutely no excuse.

If a political movement exists which advocates a particular progressive goal, let’s say gay liberation for example, and it takes a centrist stance on everything else, what happens? Well, there’s no feminism, so we’re going to have an overwhelmingly male movement. No trans liberation either, and no bi or ace advocacy, so the movement is going to be represented solely by cis gay monosexual men. And the figureheads all have to be white because including a person of colour is political. Neurotypical and fully abled too. And we can’t have any pro-environment or pro-palestine messaging, and absolutely no communist or socialist imagery. No kink either, that could offend somebody. And let’s invite the police to attend too!

Welp, we’ve invented the kind of shitty pride that 90% of queer people feel excluded from. Good job guys, we successfully represented 10% of the queer population and made everyone else feel like shit while accomplishing nothing politically.

I think every leftist movement, every single one, has to be explicitly progressive on every issue, and has to act in alliance with other leftist groups. And while going to the effort of fighting liberals within the movement on every single issue is possible, I think it’s much easier to just have a leftist theory of everything. A political theory that unites communism, feminism, BIPOC rights, queer liberation, neurodiversity, and everything else.

And yeah, there’s a theory that fits the bill. It’s called anarchism. It’s the political theory that hierarchy is not inherently self-justifying. It naturally leads to communism, feminism, and everything else I listed just through logic. And there are so many schools of anarchist thought which are mutually compatible with a bunch of others. We got anarcho-communism, anarcho-feminism, soulism, anarcho-transhumanism, go wild, it’s a leftist theory of everything that doesn’t prescribe any one truth, so many diverse and even contradictory schools of thought can exist within the anarchist space. Not anarcho-capitalism, though, that one’s nonsense.

So, there’s a 78-year-old piece of advice you probably learned in school saying to ally with communists, and some practical advice for how to get it done easily. And if your movement doesn’t overtly support all marginalised people and your fellow leftists, it’s liberal bullshit and it’s gonna get your people murdered by nazis. Have fun!