December 2020
Eyes On: Resistance to Fascism
#4 in JVP-NYC’s “Eyes On” Series of Political Education Digests
JVP-NYC EYES ON TEAM
Coordinators
Steve Botticelli, Ros Petchesky
Writers
Steve Botticelli, Ellen Braune, Sherry Gorelick, Deb KapellCara Levine, Ros Petchesky, Jay Saper, Dorothy Zellner
Logo, Design and Layout
Jane Demarest, Alexandra Raskin, Sarah Sills
When we published our last issue of Eyes On: Perspectives on Fascism, we were all holding our breath for the outcome of the November election and whatever might follow. While Trump was roundly defeated and our worst imaginings have not come to pass, the threat of fascism in this country will remain very real, under current conditions of gross income inequality, the rise of authoritarian politicians and an aroused right-wing base.
This issue of the digest features a variety of perspectives on resisting fascism specifically as well as building resistance movements more generally. After a beautiful introductory historical reflection by our own Jay Saper, we briefly review the work of Alberto Toscano, Erica Chenoweth, Gene Sharp, Dean Spade, Black Visions (a BLM allied group in Minneapolis) and others, offering commentary and drawing out the implications for our work in JVP-NYC.
With this issue we welcome long-time chapter member Deb Kapell to our Eyes On digest team. Welcome, Deb! And as always, we value your feedback. Please fill out and send in the brief survey at the end of the digest.
— Ros, Steve, Dorothy, Ellen, Cara, Deb, and Jay
Antifascism After Fascism
Fascism never falls without a fight. Never surrenders in defeat. Vigilance is the only antidote.
After the United States defeated fascism in World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen, the military's first Black aviator unit, which had been instrumental in the war effort, did not return home to a simple victory party. Jim Crow terror, a vitriol akin to that which they had put their lives on the line to rid the world from, awaited.
The Tuskegee Airmen carried on after their service abroad to fight at home for what became known as the Double V, or Double Victory, to stamp out the cold hearted anti-Blackness they faced upon
their return, which half a century
later would contribute to the rise of President Trump. The myth of the so-called victory over fascism crumbled.
Before Pearl Harbor, American politicians did not even attempt to hide their lack of disdain for despots. In 1935, when activists stormed a German liner docked in New York Harbor to tear down its Swastika, the secretary of state apologized to Hitler for the criminals who desecrated his nation’s great symbol.
Activists concerned with the fascist threat posed by the rise of Franco travelled to Spain as part of what became known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to assist the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War.
While the engagement of the allies in World War II led to the appropriation of antifascist discourse, it did not radically alter a landscape that had long been sympathetic to the rise of fascism. Across the Atlantic, Jewish veterans returned to England after the war to find Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists surging in popularity. The Jewish veterans formed the militant antifascist 43 Group to confront Mosely’s demonstrations, which were protected by the police, leading to the Battle of Cable Street.
No benevolent state, however they might choose to tell their own history, has acted as hero or savior in the struggle against fascism. Instead, a debt of gratitude is owed to the vigilance of everyday antifascists who have fought before battle was welcomed and have carried on long past victory has been declared. It will take the ongoing work and legacy of these everyday antifascists, not simply the inauguration of President- Elect Biden, to confront the continuing threats posed by Trump and his supporters.
Last inauguration, Angela Davis pronounced, “The next 1,459 days of the Trump Administration will be 1,459 days of resistance.” Rather than pleading to the public to wait patiently for things to get better, Davis shatters complacency by imploring all of us to recognize the importance of ongoing daily struggle of everyday people, the vigilance of everyday antifascism.
— Jay Saper
Racial Fascism as a “Lived Experience”
Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” November 6, 2020
Cultural critic and Marxist scholar Alberto Toscano’s contention is that “. . .talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar with interwar European dictatorships.”
Maybe I became stuck. As a young child during WWII, I have only to hear the word “fascism” and I immediately see in my mind boots goose-stepping across Europe or concentration/extermination camps filled with Communists and Socialists, Jews, Roma, LGBTQ people and other “undesirables.” But then Toscano asks: “But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?” and immediately opens up our thinking.
Earlier in our “Eyes On” series, Sarah Churchwell listed essential characteristics of fascism: nostalgia for a purer (and in our case, whiter) past; paramilitary groups; delegitimizing of political opponents; and “fetishized patriarchal masculinity and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance.” She added that racism was central to understand “our” fascism. Toscano posits that “As the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, the threat is not of a ‘return of the 1930s’ but the ongoing fact of racialized state terror,” and takes off from there.
Reaching back into the 1930s, Toscano quotes Pan-Africanist George Padmore, who saw settler-colonial racism “as the breeding ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.”
In 1937, Langston Hughes told the Second International Writers Congress in Paris, “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” Much later, Amiri Baraka called the overthrow of Reconstruction “racial fascism.” And today in 2020, Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials assert that, “. . .while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience.” (My italics.) Angela Davis and George Jackson shared a “lived experience”— the “violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism.”
In a wide-ranging discussion that includes the Black Panthers, Jean Genet, and Herbert Marcuse, Toscano makes one point that stands out for me: the fact that fascism, in Marcuse’s words, can be used as “a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.”
How terribly familiar this sounds! A serious number of the almost 74 million people in this country who voted for Trump in the 2020 election seemed to be ready to participate in this kind of “preventative counterrevolution.” Our responsibilities to deal with this are daunting, so we should know exactly what we are up against. This article was a helpful nudge in that direction. I think I may be getting un-stuck.
— Dorothy M. Zellner
Measuring the Impact of Civil Resistance
Erica Chenoweth, “Paradox of Civil Resistance in the 21st Century”
Much to their surprise--they hadn’t expected this result--Erica Chenoweth (pronouns they/them), a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, was able to prove quantitatively that nonviolent civil resistance is more successful than violence. Their conclusions are presented in several YouTube videos, a 15-minute TED talk among them, as well as a forthcoming book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2021.
The geekier analytical features of their theory appealed to me, a retired data analyst, but I stayed for the stories. Chenoweth compiled a database of all cases of conflict with maximalist goals- the overthrow of a government or independence struggle, over 1,000 active participants, and occurring between 1900 and 2006. Half of the struggles that succeeded were nonviolent while only 23% of the violent conflicts succeeded.
Diversity, size, discipline, imagination, and importantly, encouraging defections from opponents were factors in successful nonviolent resistance. A case in point is the Serbian Bulldozer Revolution. Slobodan Milosevic, an autocratic, genocidal kleptocrat, refused to concede the election of 2000. After mass demonstrations, a miners’ strike, and a general strike, a call went out for Serbians to descend on Belgrade. Between 500,000 and a million people came, some driving their bulldozers. The bulldozers broke through the police barricades and liberated the television station. A few days later Milosevic left town. The crowd was so big and so diverse that the police feared hurting friends and family if they fired. The police defected.
Concentrated demonstrations where people come together are important, but they are not the only tactic. Dispersion- people staying away from where they should be- helped to overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
When the oil workers didn’t appear for work, the Shah’s security forces went to their homes and marched them to work. The oil workers proceeded to work, but at half pace. The same scenario happened for the next four days. Finally, the security forces gave up and switched sides. The oil workers didn’t bring down the Shah by themselves, but proving that workers could slow oil output to a trickle helped.
Nonviolent resistance need not be dangerous for participants. Lots of countries used the tactic of cacerolazos or casserole demonstrations. In 1971 Chilean women demonstrated against food shortages by banging pots, pans, and casserole dishes, and making noise. If nothing else, the racket showed unity of purpose and raised the morale of the participants.
Morocco has been repressing the Western Sahara Independence movement (POLISARIO) to the point that it is illegal to fly the independence flag. Activists announced that they would defy the order, hold a huge demonstration, and fly the flag. Rather than take to the streets, the activists tied flags around the tails of the many street cats in Rabat. When the riot police showed up, people stayed inside but the cats flying their flags were released. The police were faced with the choice between ignoring the flags or chasing the cats- a lose-lose proposition.
The tactics Chenoweth described were not one-shot deals. Victory, when it happened, was the result of long term organizing, a diverse population, a variety of nonviolent tactics, and convincing the opposition to defect. Those of us who organize here and now should remember the importance of encouraging defections. Somehow, we must engage Trump’s followers. Admittedly this is easier said than done, but so is ending the Occupation. As opponents of the Israeli occupation, we understand that we need them on our side.
— Deb Kapell
Intellectual and Activist Roots of Civil Resistance - An Overview
Journalist Andrew Marantz has given us a comprehensive and lively survey of the contemporary thinkers and organizers who have done the most to make nonviolent popular action an effective strategy against fascistic forces and state violence. In the wake of Trump’s persistent effort to deny the clear results of the US presidential election and perhaps even effect a coup, Marantz remarks “how unremarkable it seems, in 2020, that the US is a country badly in need of a democracy movement.”
Marantz starts by casting a spotlight on the work of Erica Chenoweth, her collaborator, Maria Stephan, and their groundbreaking databases and book (see Deb Kapell’s piece above). Reading Deb’s and Marantz’s accounts of Chenoweth’s work brought out the latent political theorist in me. Their quantitative, empirical data showing that nonviolent movements are more successful than armed movements in creating positive change not only sustains older philosophies of civil disobedience like those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They also bring to mind the key argument I made to all my classes for decades: power is never absolute; even in the most totalitarian regimes, it still depends on what Chenoweth calls “pillars of support” and, ultimately, on the consent and obedience of the many.
One of the most influential strategists of nonviolent civil resistance is Gene Sharp, who died in 2018 but whose many workshops and writings have been like a bible to leaders of mass nonviolent uprisings from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Occupy Wall Street in the US.
Other, more recent pivot points of this movement include the activist training institute Momentum; the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC);
the Global Nonviolent Action Database established by another well-known scholar-activist, George Lakey; and, above all, Black-led groups like Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and Critical Resistance. One of the activists Marantz interviewed commented: “It’s not a coincidence that Black Americans have led when it came to bringing civil-resistance tactics into American organizing, because Black Americans have not been living in a democracy for four hundred years.”
This fall’s perfect storm of horribleness (right-wing threats to elections on top of covid, unemployment, food lines, evictions) awakened millions of whites as well as people of color to the precariousness of “living in a democracy.” In this context, the ideas of people like Chenoweth, Sharp, Lakey, and the leaders of Black Lives Matter took off. As Black Visions and M4BL defended Black lives, groups like Frontline, Hold the Line, Seed the Vote and countless grassroots Black women-led groups conducted massive social media and phone-banking campaigns to defend voting rights. Marantz describes the exuberant celebrations of Saturday, Nov. 7, when Trump’s defeat (to most of us, not to him or his supporters) became a certainty. In Columbus Circle in New York “A very tall drag queen in a witch’s hat roamed through the crowd, shouting, ‘You’re fired, honey!’”
But tacticians like Chenoweth and Kifah Shah of Hold the Line urge us to step back and ponder the gulf between stopping Trump – stopping fascism for a moment – and “building movement infrastructure.” This is the difference between what George Lakey calls “strategizing for defense” and the much more difficult, long-term “strategizing for change.” The work lies ahead.
— Rosalind Petchesky
Strengths and Limits of Mutual Aid in Movements for Social Change
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Verso, 2020
“Mutual aid is the best onramp for getting people involved in transformative action because they get to address things harming them and their communities right away” (p. 96).
In this short booklet Dean Spade makes his case for mutual aid as an effective way to draw masses of people into building movements to create social change by organizing around immediate crises. When disaster strikes, or even under business-as-usual conditions, capitalism is often not up to the task of meeting people’s basic needs. Drawing people together to address unmet needs can become an opportunity to build political power. Examples include the child breakfast program initiated by the Black Panthers, which drew many into the politics of Black Liberation in the late 1960s and 70s (and which prompted the USDA to replicate the effort through its own free breakfast program in schools), and the Occupy Sandy effort that was organized to assist victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Spade’s booklet offers a theoretical rationale for mutual aid as a vehicle for instigating social change, including an examination of what distinguishes mutual aid from charity, as well as practical description of how to organize a mutual aid group. Many of the principles for organizing that Spade recommends are in line with the way that our JVP chapter has approached its organizing in the current period: horizontal decision making; consciously seeing ourselves as a part of a larger movement; creating a welcoming group culture that aims to draw in
the largest number of participants and quickly bring new members into the work of the chapter.At least one of Spade’s principles, consensus-based decision making, drawn from an anarchist model of organizing, is not one we in JVP have subscribed to.
As members of JVP-NYC we might also differ with Spade regarding the question of ultimate political aims, although the booklet itself elides discussion of this issue. From my reading, it appears that Spade believes mutual aid projects should aim at “scaling up” to the point that everyone’s needs are met, and that in the political sphere all are drawn into meaningful participation in decisions about governing their affairs, creating a kind of replacement government that operates alongside the formal one, participatory democracy alongside a (nominally but badly functioning) representative one. Within this scheme, the “official” government seems to fade into irrelevance. But then why would we still be paying taxes to it, voting for its officers in elections, etc.? Rather than aim to make up for the government’s failures, might we not rather make demands on the state to provide what we need? Roughly speaking, it’s the difference between an anarchist vs. socialist model of formulating political aims, and Spade might have done well to spell out these different perspectives.
Useful as Spade’s ideas are for our organizing, some of JVP’s most important aims make specific demands on governing bodies—e.g., local governments and police departments to drop their exchange programs with their Israeli counterparts; the federal government to cease its financial and other support to the Israeli state. In this regard, a mutual aid model can take us only so far in achieving our ultimate goals.
— Steve Botticelli
The Way Forward For Anti-Racism Organizing - Learning from Black Visions
Activists from Black Visions in Minneapolis. The movement purposefully takes a pluralistic approach to leadership, in order to avoid the mistakes of previous pushes for justice. Credit… D'Angelo Lovell Williams for The New York Times
This feature article profiles Black Visions, a three-year-old political and community base for Black people in Minneapolis. It then provides a broader overview of the networks and alliances formed nationally, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over 150 black-led organizations, which includes BLM. The article contains critical insights for the struggle ahead. It explores the vision, organizing principles, strategy, and tactics that Black organizing uses to build and sustain power in Black communities across the country and on a national level – both essential to systemic change.
First, vision and strategy are essential for long-term sustainable organizing and movement building. "Across Black organizing, there was a recognition that reforms are no longer adequate — an entirely new system needed to be imagined," says Wortham. "The forefront has always been sustainability, strategy, and vision, and that's what guided us."according to Black Vision's Kandace Montgomery, "An unapologetically Black approach was needed, especially in Minnesota.'"
Community-based organizations such as Black Vision are a central component of building power and making sustained change. "We've always sought relief at the federal level, but national work can't do anything unless there's strong local work," according to M Adams, an executive director of Freedom, Inc., in Madison, Wisconsin. "After the death of George Floyd Black Visions was a Black-led group with deep ties to queer, immigrant and transgender communities, Groups like Black Visions are critical because they …(are) hyperlocal experiments for how you build power in a non-Black-majority city because that reflects the overall dynamic in the country,"
Protests are critical, but they don't necessarily result in deeper organizing. It's important we know there's a difference between a protester and an organizer," said Oluchi Omeoga, an integral member of Black Visions, "There's a different skill set needed to mobilize people on a mass scale. That's the biggest lesson we learned from 2013 and 2016 — we need skills to organize versus just showing up." As Wortham notes, "Organizing work, by nature, is built on years of relationships. It is deeply personal, which means it tends to include conflict and trust issues. Building Trust and resolving conflict are critical to an organization and successful alliances and coalitions for sustainable joint action."
Coalitions, networks, and alliances that link the local to the national are critical to building resistance. "How do we strengthen our local infrastructure?" Black Vision's Montgomery asked. "That's something that feels missing. How do we strengthen what we're doing at home and then connecting it to the national?" Cross-Black alliances must establish the level of trust and dialogue needed to support complex relationships. "BLM was under attack,” said Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn]. "We needed to be in coalition, share what we were learning, study and debate and get to a place of unity and strategy."
As the movement formed alliances and deepened their organizing, they had to make structural changes to their organizing model to avoid past mistakes. For example, as Wortham states, “it [the movement] rejected "the model of overemphasizing charismatic Black male leaders— and also projected targets onto them, allowing their arrests (or worse, assassinations) to sabotage the work of thousands." It was essential to adopt new strategies and approaches, especially for youth involvement and deep change. Wortham notes that "generational divides are common, especially when younger activists seek new powerful approaches. Youth aren't "weighed down by earlier defeats or habituated to a particular method of organizing or thinking." For the young people, this meant escalating the pressure, while the 'old guard' continued to counsel patience and allowing the process to play out." As Wortham states, "Black Lives Matter felt fresher, more revolutionary and appropriate for the times."
While we continue forward, we must pay attention to the importance of shifting the narrative. New narratives open space for defining structural problems. As the author points out, "words that were rarely spoken in mainstream arenas — "defund," "white supremacy," "racism," "abolish" — are now being earnestly discussed." I would add intersectionality and systemic racism, redefining the problem and, therefore, the necessary solutions. Equally important is the redefinition of safety to define solutions such as defunding police departments and reallocating funds to Black communities. According to Montgomery, "Black people, and queer people, and trans people and Indigenous people and disabled people and immigrants and poor people: We have never looked to the police for our safety. We have looked to each other for protection from the police."
*For more on Black resistance moving forward, I highly recommend watching, Here’s What’s Next: Movement for Black Lives, featuring community-based and national leaders.
— Ellen Braune