By Matthew N. Lyons
Three Way Fight
August 6th, 2019
Where is the rightist onslaught headed and how should we respond?
These days, horrific events keep piling on top of each other so fast
it’s hard to keep up. In an attempt to get a bit of long-term
perspective, Bo in Seattle initiated the following dialog recently on
Facebook. We republish it here in hopes it will offer some useful pieces
of a larger picture and stimulate further discussion.
Bo:
What is happening now? How does it compare to things that happened earlier? What might we see on the horizon? What should we do?
Though much of it is secular, today’s US far-right represents the spread
of the success of the strategy of the religious right post-Vietnam. In
the 80s and 90s you had shootouts and bombings of feds and abortion
doctors and sometimes deadly conflicts with racist skinheads
(“boneheads”), but it was the more above-ground organized militancy of
Operation Rescue and later the patriot/militia/minuteman movement who
really showed how their side could work to change society. They had
success even under triangulators like Bush 1 and Obama, and now with
figures like Cruz and Trump on the national stage they can take it
further.
For the first time in at least 40 years organized non-state actors are
being encouraged and excused by both some local cops and some national
politicians to commit physical attacks on multiple categories of
oppressed people, the activist/political left, and parts of the extended
state (public lands, Planned Parenthood). “Liberal” cities drained of
their working (and street-fighting) classes by deindustrialization and
gentrification can now be fought for block by block by the likes of the
Proud Boys. They have had failures but also successes in getting the
media to parrot their narrative of the fight. Trump has rallied and
remade the middle levels of the Republican Party after him and will
likely win re-election.
The erosion of the right to vote by gerrymandering, excluding felons and
the undocumented is important-maybe even more important ultimately, but
the organized extra-state political violence seems like the really new
thing in this moment.
How well can the Proud Boys, the Christian/patriot/militia movement,
Trump, the Republican Party, and law enforcement stick together? (There
is also the factor of the super hard right like former members of the
Nationalist Front or the lone wolves continually attempting various
shootings and bombings, but as with the 80s and 90s I expect the more
above-ground groups to have more impact.)
Who are these organized far rightists, and who do they hate (us,
obviously)? The “free helicopter rides” set can be okay with some people
who aren’t exactly the titular hero of “American Sniper,” but at least
40% of the population are better off dead in their eyes. The winking OK
to get physical with us is a dream come true for them.
With Trump we have something like Reagan, Roberston, and Buchanan in one
person: Both a successful national politician/president and someone who
at least excuses a far-right movement, even if he doesn’t always lead
it. There’s another way these days are different from the Reagan era
too, though: This time it’s the US military instead of the Soviet one
that is grinding its gears in Afghanistan and overstretching itself
elsewhere. This means we have to be attentive to new shifts in the
landscape of production/trade, terrorism/war, and climate change that
could affect the state, the far right, and our organizing in ways that
will surprise us all, presenting new dangers and opportunities.
Unless we fight for and win an egalitarian alternative, the next way of
organizing global society with likely be some kind of ruined barbarism
in which people are directly owned, which I take as a feature of both
absolute monarchy and fascism. And American history.
The Proud Boys (at least) are (at least) proto-fascist in their love of
the nation and organized activity to directly subjugate the oppressed
and repress the political left. They say “go make me a sandwich, b*tch”
and beat women activists bloody in front of Planned Parenthood while
cops watch. This is the heart of their politics. So I feel comfortable
calling them and anyone to their right “fash” as short-hand.
However, getting at what the hell is going on and what we should do
doesn’t really map onto 1919 Germany or Italy (or Amerikkka) in any
super-clean way that is immediately illuminating. We need to keep
thinking, keep organizing, and keep being totally honest about our
politics. It will definitely mean at least trying to be prepared for
physical confrontation. It definitely won’t mean silencing our criticism
of various reformist and opportunist currents, or getting wrapped up in
the electoral spectacle.
For now we have to be able to mitigate the far-right threat to left
freedom of assembly/organizing/movement. We should deal with it as a
necessary element of all our organizing. We defend ourselves because we
need to organize, we organize because we need to rebuild consciousness
and power, we need consciousness and power to fight for and win the
world we want. So when we work to defend our organizing from the
far-right we need to do defense in a way that builds consciousness and
power to those revolutionary ends (i.e. don’t rely on the law). We need
to survive, fight, and grow all at once, and under our own power. When
we build unions of tenants or workers, without hitching them to (some
section of) the ruling class and its state, and while being totally open
about our politics, we need to be ready to take on not just the bosses
and the law but also the extra-legal far-right, who are one more
hardship against us after the time card, the rent, the prison cell, and
the border wall, making our self-organization both more challenging and
more necessary.
Matthew:
I have a few thoughts in response to this piece — not disagreeing but delving a bit more into some of the issues raised:
1. The upsurge in violence by non-state actors with support from sections of the state points to the potential return to vigilante repression as a major part of the U.S. system of social control. Vigilante repression (pogroms, lynchings, and countless daily smaller attacks against members of oppressed communities) has always been integral to U.S. society, while for most of U.S. history the repressive power of the state itself was relatively small. For the past half century, however, many forms of vigilante repression have been delegitimized, a shift that’s been coupled with a massive growth of the state’s repressive apparatus. Vigilante repression’s resurgence now should be seen in relation to current trends with regard to the state, which are in some ways contradictory: the repressive apparatus is still growing and (through rapid developments in IT) taking on functions that were previously unimagined, but in other ways the state is also shrinking and fragmenting, partly due to sustained rightist and business-led drives for deregulation and privatization of state functions (including police, military, and prisons, among others).
2. The political right in the U.S. isn’t nearly as unified as it’s often portrayed. There’s a broad agreement on wanting to roll back the social, political, and cultural changes associated with the 1960s and its aftermath, and to re-intensify traditional lines of oppression, but there’s a lot of disagreement about ideology, strategy, and whether the existing political system is salvageable. And because U.S. society has changed a lot in the past half century, and because sectors of the right have absorbed and co-opted elements of these changes in various ways, we’ve seen new developments and seeming contradictions, such as the Christian right mobilizing large numbers of women, or Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, etc. recruiting men of color in significant numbers. It would be strategically dangerous for us to ignore these complexities.
3. The relationship of the ruling class to all this shouldn’t be taken for granted, and we should be skeptical of the standard leftist assumption that the right serves capitalist interests. Significant sections of the right genuinely hate the ruling class as much as leftists do, and those that don’t often have other priorities. Trump won the presidency although capitalists favored his opponent by a large margin. Capitalists obviously have lots of influence within the right, but they are often reacting to pressures from below as much as pushing their own agendas. We should assume that capitalists will pursue multiple and to some extent conflicting political strategies, including both rightist and anti-rightist ones.
Bo:
I believe point #3 is often overlooked by the left. Without it we have
no way to understand how Golden Dawn has failed in Greece despite the
left ALSO failing. It seems the center has continued to hold by offering
both carrots and sticks to both left and right.
Point #1 reminds me that police killings of Black people have overtaken
the most deadly years of lynching. When I read that stat some years ago
it occurred to me: The police have replaced vigilantes as the
extra-legal executioner whose very public killings terrorize a whole
population. But the extra-legal part is making a comeback as well- some
white supremacists have said they were “radicalized” (I read it as
emboldened) by George Zimmerman. In this ongoing tradeoff between state
and non-state violence we can understand the US a lot better by looking
at other settler states like Mexico and Israel than by looking at
Europe.
