By Daphne Lawless
Fightback Newsletter
Part 1 of a two-part review of Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism, Xtn Alexander, Matthew N. Lyons, and Janeen Porter (eds). Kerseplebedeb, 2024.
What’s wrong with this picture?
We beg forgiveness for beginning this review with a block quote from a Wikipedia article:
The horseshoe theory asserts that advocates of the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together. The theory is attributed to the French philosopher and writer of fiction and poetry Jean-Pierre Faye in his 1972 book Théorie du récit: introduction aux langages totalitaires, in relation to Otto Strasser.
But it just happens that this paragraph precisely describes what Fightback (and we assume, our readers) would reject about this theory. Otto Strasser was a dissident Nazi who objected to Hitler and Goebbels abandoning their anti-capitalist and populist rhetoric as they came closer to power. In many ways, Strasser and his brother Gregor were the original “Red-Browns” or “Third Positionists”, the tradition which seeks to reconcile anti-capitalist and fascist ideas.i
In other words, we reject the suggestion that “the extremes” (socialism and fascism, in this diagram) have any necessary resemblance or even relationship to each other. We have argued at great length that there are progressive and reactionary alternatives to neoliberal globalised capitalism, and to confuse the two leads to not only the failure of the progressive cause but the triumph of reaction.ii But then; what’s wrong with this picture?
The Fishhook Theory is the equal-but-opposite counterpart to the Horseshoe, which argues that in fact it is the political centre (aka “the Establishment”, or even “the Libs”) who are close to or even identical with fascists. This harks back to the infamous “Third Period” analysis of German Communists in the 1930s, who described the centre-left Social Democrats as “social fascists”, and accordingly downplayed the threat of the actual fascists taking power, much like the edgy online Left today mock those worried by the threat of “Trump 2.0” or military victories for Putin.
When this analysis showed its utter bankruptcy as the German communists ended up in Hitler’s camps, the Stalin-dominated Communist International (Comintern) did a 180-degree turn, towards a “Popular Front” strategy of broad alliances with “democratic” capitalism. But their analysis that the social base of fascism was capital, or of a faction of capital, persisted. Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern’s Secretary-General, gave a famous definition of fascism in 1935: “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.
What the Horseshoe and Fishhook theories have in common is that they both deny that fascism is a phenomenon in and of itself. The Fishhook argues that fascism is just capitalist politics, or at least the politics of one kind of capitalist, with the mask taken off. The Horseshoe argues that it’s simply one “flavour” of illiberal, anti-democratic politics, and not really different from revolutionary socialism.
Fightback has long rejected both these analyses. But in this, we are only part of a long tradition stretching back decades or more. This is an overview of a book which gives an excellent overview of that long tradition.
II
The introduction to Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism explains things succinctly:
In 2004, a small group of revolutionary antifascists started the Three Way Fight blog and websiteiii as a project to share information and analysis about political movements and the context in which they operate…
Its supporters rejected the conventional liberal model that portrayed authoritarian extremists threatening a democratic center, but they also challenged the standard leftist binary that saw fascism and liberalism as arrayed together in defense of capitalism against the working-class left…
Leftists need to confront both the established capitalist order and an insurgent or even revolutionary right, while recognizing that these opponents are also in conflict with each other. Hence the term “three way fight”. (Kindle locations 185, 187, 198, 200)
The basis of this approach is that fascism is neither just a mask for the worst forms of capitalism, nor a possible partner in a fight against capitalism, but something independent from and hostile to both the state and the working-class movement.
Although the Three-Way Fight model is traditionally associated with anarchists, the introduction to the book traces the early origins of the concept to the Sojourner Truth Organisation (STO), a “post-Maoist” organisation which traced the theory out in the early 1980s.iv The STO’s analysis (reproduced in full in the book) made the vital insight that while fascism has “intimate connections with the needs of the capitalist class,” it also
contains an anti-capitalist ‘revolutionary’ side that is not reducible to simple demagogy… It represents a revolutionary challenge to capitalist power—not revolutionary in any liberatory sense, but in that it aims to seize power and systematically transform society along repressive and often genocidal lines. (222)
This is a crucial point for a generation of socialists who might have been using “revolutionary” as an unproblematic good thing: there are worse things than bourgeois “liberal democracy”. Autonomist Marxist and STO veteran Don Hamerquist argues:
I think that fascism has the potential to become a mass movement with a substantial and genuine element of revolutionary anti-capitalism… fascism is not merely a blunt instrument used to prop up industrial capitalism but is, rather, a whole new form of barbarism, one that quite disconcertingly comes with mass support. Fascism has its own independent political life, and as such, while the bourgeoisie can influence it, it is ultimately independent of it. (1124, 1128, 1130).
It is precisely the sincere revolutionary vision and bottom-up dynamic of fascism that makes it so acutely dangerous for socialists to consider “Red-Brown” alliances, especially in times of political backwardness and defeat. The Marxist tradition has traditionally described “Caesarism” or “Bonapartism” – an authoritarian populist movement backing a charismatic leader, of which fascism is a variation – as arising in times of political exhaustion and deadlock, where neither “elite” nor “popular” forces are able to achieve a real victory. This looks very familiar from the vantage point of 2024, as Don Hamerquist suggests:
Although these popular upsurges are increasingly frequent, widespread, and disruptive, their capacity to expand working-class power and autonomy is undermined by an atomized hopelessness and cynicism that also reflects the increased precarity of working-class life. (3277)
Thus, fascism offers the contending classes some way forward out of stasis, “beyond left and right” in the words of its traditional slogan. As rowan, “a friend of Three Way Fight” says in an interview:
It is incredibly attractive to believe that the world is neatly divided with bad guys on one side representing oppression and exploitation, racism, patriarchy, bigotry, empire, and fascism, and good guys on the other representing liberation, feminism, decolonization, and a free society….
A lot of the time it feels like radical analyses of the far right just start from the assumption that they’re lying. Thus, when folks on the right oppose economic exploitation of the working class, prioritize ecology and defending the earth, or even oppose white supremacy, leftists often dismiss these as lies or attempts to trick people. The three way fight perspective helps us to listen, to be open to the possibility that they speak the truth about their visions, and to recognize that our enemies are complex, which makes them all the more dangerous as we struggle to defeat them.v (926, 939, 943)
This collection shows that Fightback’s warnings over the last decade about the dangers of campism and Red-Brown alliances were in fact somewhat late to the party. Fifteen years previously, antifascists involved in the antiglobalisation movement
found themselves confronting not only global corporations and intergovernmental bodies but…the wider spread of fascistic ideas such as antisemitic conspiracism—within the movement’s own ranks… The September 11 attacks showed even more dramatically that global capitalism’s enemies could be found not only on the radical left but also on the far right… Kdog’s “Fifth Column Fascism,” written shortly after 9/11, declared “All resistance [to US imperialism] ain’t liberatory and all fascists ain’t aryan,” (265, 270, 280)
Many on the radical Left were not politically prepared for a world in which, as Michael Staudenmeier puts it, “the most significant attack on the global power of the United States in at least a generation came from the right, not from the left” (6101); some even decided that maybe the Right weren’t such bad fellows. More recently, many of the same forces have been drawn into a Red-Brown form of “anti-imperialism” sponsored by the Russian state, exemplified by the notorious “Multi-Polar World” conference held in Moscow in 2014 (2992). “Multi-Polar World” is of course an expression originating with the esoteric fascist philosopher Aleksander Dugin (3011). Matthew Lyons, co-editor of this collectionvi, notes:
Marxist academician Efe Can Gürcan, for example, recently discussed Eurasianism (specifically including Duginism) as an ideological challenge to NATO and US imperialism but didn’t mention that Aleksandr Dugin is a fascist. When I objected, Gürcan replied, “One should not avoid potentially transformative dialogue with such movements [as Dugin’s] merely because they are not leftist or because their practices are in some areas objectionable.” As a self-deluding rationale for red-brown coalition building, this is hard to beat. (3090)
In explaining fascism’s relative independence from capitalist politics, Three Way Fight emphasises its middle-class base. American Maoist author J Sakai notes that the German Nazi movement was “primarily formed by men of lower middle class and declassed backgrounds ‘that are abandoned on the sidelines of history’.” (1134) This replicates the insights of Leon Trotsky, whose analysis of fascism a previous Fightback articlevii summarised as “a bottom-up movement, which while it might be funded by some parts of big business, is based on the support and activism of the insecure middle classes and the most impoverished layers of society” – the atomised layers of fearful individuals whom Trotsky referred to as “human dust”.viii Later in the book, Devin Zane Shaw identifies this as precisely the class composition of the January 6, 2021 rioters in Washington DC (2265) – as the popular stereotype has it, “dentists and used car dealers”.
It is this revolutionary, or even insurgent, side to fascism which distinguishes it from other forms of reactionary politics. Matthew Lyons makes the distinction between anti-systemic and system-loyal variants of Right-wing popular politics. A fascist movement, as a revolutionary movement, wants to smash the system, as opposed to conservative forms of Right-wing politics which seek to defend the existing system against real or imagined threats from “outsiders”. So there is a difference between
a genuine fascist movement, which is a movement of insurgents, and the system-loyal right-wing nationalist populism of the Trump presidency. While Trump drove home the slogan “Make America Great Again,” it was not fundamentally premised on the idea that the American project has failed. (1316-7)
Devin Zane Shaw also notes the contradiction between “system-loyal vigilantism and system-oppositional armed organization” (2307), in suggesting that it is too simplistic to argue that State security forces are always going to be supportive of fascists, or vice versa.
The political movement behind Donald Trump is understandably at the focal point of many modern debates on the Left about what “fascism” is. It seems doubtful that Trump himself can be described as a fascist in any meaningful way; the US Twitter commentator Sami Gold is probably closest when he describes Trump as a “personalist”, that is, someone whose main principle is that he personally should be in charge. But it is indisputable that, as Rowland Keshena Robinson puts it, “a number of explicitly white nationalist organizations, theorists, and influencers have been highly motivated and emboldened by Trump”. (1062)
Thus, this book points out the slippage in the Trump movement between “system-loyal” and “anti-system” positions – in a similar way that the Ku Klux Klan historically moved between defending and attacking the US establishment (2347). To be crude: when Trump’s in power, his followers pledge allegiance to the United States; when it’s not, they talk about “burning it all down”. In fact, the line was crossed specifically during the January 6, 2021 attempted putsch, during which “millions of people … moved—at least temporarily—from system loyalty into system opposition, as symbolized by Proud Boys stomping on a Thin Blue Line flag”. (4572) As Matthew Lyons puts it:
there’s been this larger shift of a large section of the right which had been system loyal into a much more directly oppositional stance of rejecting the legitimacy of the system because they see the election that put Biden on top as illegitimate, and that from their standpoint it robbed Trump of his rightful position as president. (4337)
It seems plausible that this is what led the Republican establishment to briefly desert Trump and even to not fight against his second impeachment very hard; and that their return to him over the last three years was predicated precisely on his retreat to a “system-loyal” position.
Matthew Lyons characterises fascism as “as a disparate array of forces, which can sometimes find themselves in coalition with one another but which do not necessarily share the same constellation of goals. What is essential is the question of supremacy” (1146). This does not necessarily mean white supremacy, although that is of course how fascism has generally presented itself in the United States. Robinson’s chapter expands on Aimé Césaire’s observation that fascist politics look a lot like settler-colonial politics, brought back to the metropolis:
Geographically speaking, on its own soil fascism is imperialist repression turned inward… [insurgent fascist forces] all desire for a new frontier, for recolonization, for territories, for a white homeland. (1172, 1313)
Similarly, Shaw quotes J Sakai’s observation that “white settler colonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche. Having one, capitalist society didn’t yet need the other” (2352). It was only with the growth of the Civil Rights movement that liberalism began to shift to a position of redressing the wrongs of white supremacy at the margins, and where fascism could then coalesce as its insurgent enemy, seeking “the rebirth of the settler-colonial project” (2368).
However, several commentators have also noted the increase in Black and Latino members of fascist and other far-right movements in the United States, leading to the glib comment on the infamous 4chan that this movement “honestly doesn’t care what race you are, as long as you’re racist”. This diversification of the fascist base across racial lines goes along with, not only a “nativist” opposition to immigration, but the growing importance of anti-feminism to the far Right. Tammy Kovich’s chapter describes the importance of the “Gamergate” and “manosphere” movements to this new development:
Sexism, rather than racism, is the gateway drug that has led many to join the alt-right… These various online communities and the different patriarchal orientations they represent have led many insecure, marginalized, and otherwise struggling men to broader fascistic politics. They function to create a culture united in the belief that white male masculinity is under attack and the status of men must be protected at all costs. (1456, 1520)
Although not all fascists are necessarily homophobic (and several prominent figures are gay men), Kovich describes the basis of fascist gender politics as “(1) gender essentialism; (2) gender difference; and (3) gender hierarchy” (1545). The growing transphobic movement – accurately characterised by libcom.org as “the women’s division of the global far right”ix – indicates that any position of supremacy in contemporary society can, should the beneficiaries of that supremacy feel under threat, evoke a fascist movement to defend it.
III
The chapters of Three Way Fight divide neatly between theoretical approaches to the problem of antifascism, written at various points throughout history, and reports on various aspects of practical antifascism. In places, these confirm that certain features of the modern antifascist struggle have been pretty much the same for the last forty years. A research bulletin from 2001, for example, identifies the Workers’ World Party as building a “de-facto Red-Brown alliance” (740) with supporters of the Serbian National Front in the antiwar movement. The WWP are still at it today – giving anti-imperialist cover for mass murder in Syria and Ukraine – although their splinter party the PSL is now the more prominent culprit.
Tammy Kovich’s article on “Antifascism against Machismo” takes issue with the stereotype of antifascist politics as based on macho street fighting: “an antifascism rooted in machismo is the political equivalent of a bar fight—as haphazard and chaotic as it is incoherent and often sloppy”. (2079)
In contrast, an antifascism oriented toward militancy instead of machismo is concerned with commitment, collectivity, and effectiveness… A vibrant movement would have a place for a two-year-old child up to their eighty-two-year-old grandparent. (2081, 2086)
But she also rejects the alternative of “a pacifying liberal feminism of ‘pussy hats’ and ‘protective policing’”.x (1405)This is also the lesson of Suzy Subways’ reflections on the history of radical defence of abortion clinics in the 1990s US. After the Clinton administration made it a crime to blockade clinics, the direct action movement to physically confront anti-abortion radicals was “dismantled” by liberal feminist NGOs, who were much happier relying on the police and courts. (5206)
The Three Way Fight analysis suggests that state action to “protect” women or queer/trans people under threat from fascism will not end well. Historically in the United States, barbaric racial violence was excused as necessary to keep white women safe from rape: “calls for the safety of women were answered with the expansion of a racialized penal state… More recently, the trope of “the immigrant rapist,” “the barbaric refugee,” and “the Muslim extremist” have been central” (1737, 1754). The family resemblance that this trope bears to TERF memes about trans people as abusers is striking.
Kovich insists on the need for a broad community anti-fascism which goes beyond traditional ideas of what antifascist organising looks like:
Antifascist gyms are great, and antifascist football clubs can be useful. But what about an antifascist neighborhood association? Or antifascist storytelling time for children, or an antifascist food program? Or maybe, antifascist day at the nail salon or an antifascist roller derby league?xi (6887)
The need for this to also reach beyond self-described radicals is emphasised by Devin Zane Shaw:
many militants have worked to create a broader social atmosphere of everyday antifascism, which brought those who I would call “liberal antifascists” into the broader struggle against far-right groups. Fostering everyday antifascism makes it possible to organize a broader movement in opposition to far-right groups when they mobilize in our cities. (2163)
As Shaw puts it, “Antifascism seeks to raise the cost of fascist organizing, and that is the most obvious reason why the diversity of tactics plays an important role in organizing.” (2382) That is, while physical confrontation with fascist mobilisations is not the correct tactic in every situation, it is something which must always be an option. Kieran, an Industrial Workers of the World organiser who helped in the successful deplatforming of Milo Yianniopolous at Berkeley in 2017, agrees:
Militant tactics is a part of our strategy, but it’s not the only part. A big part of it is a battle for the hearts and minds that the fascists are trying to recruit for their base…
we don’t want to be what Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin called a “vanguard versus vanguard,” where people just see two street gangs fighting with each other and don’t really see their needs or demands met by either one of them. Instead, we want to try to organize ourselves and our coworkers and our neighbors into a popular response to the fascists. (5313, 5396)
In other words, reducing antifascism to a single tactic (be it non-violent community organising, pressuring elected officials, or street confrontation) always works to demobilise and dismantle the mass “united front” necessary for victory. Asked whether media coverage of physical confrontation might alienate parts of a united front, Kieran argues:
most working-class people respect folks who stand up and are willing to defend themselves and are willing to take risks… People who are already suspicious of the way the mainstream media talks about anything are likely to have a more positive response seeing a group of people standing up and fighting back. (5323)
Thus, the “united front” approach requires that militant antifascists know when to “go it alone” without liberal allies. An essential element of Three Way Fight analysis, as Shaw points out, is that “each ‘corner’ of the three way fight struggles against the other two while at the same time this struggle offers lines of adjacency against a common enemy” (2293) Thus, the temporary alliance between militant and liberal antifascism is based on “the line of adjacency between militant antifascism and the egalitarian aspirations of bourgeois democracy” (2298). But, once the immediate fascist threat is withdrawn, liberal anti-fascists will tend to return to a Horseshoe Theory analysis and see their former militant allies as the new threat:
under normal conditions, liberal ideology writ large—and liberal antifascists as a whole are typically no exception—condemns insurgent organizing, whether it is the militant left or the far right, as political “extremism”…
liberal antifascists set aside the framework of “extremism” in order to enter the struggle between militant antifascism and the far right…. However, when the threat of fascism seems to have passed… we should expect, and must prepare for, liberal antifascism to revert to its normal institutional habits.
The extension of law enforcement powers that followed in the wake of far-right actions related to the Capitol riot will redound against left-wing militants, because the repressive state apparatus specifically frames its work in this domain as a fight against extremism. (2212, 2223, 2230)
“Diversity of tactics” refers not only to how militant antifascists react to other parts of a united front, but to how they relate to the communities which they defend and which they want to mobilise. Kieran gives an example of the IWW General Defence Committee working with a Black community in Minneapolis, who reacted badly to antifascists masking up (5446). A similar reflection comes from IWW GDC members who confronted a mobilisation by alt-Right agitator Richard Spencer in Auburn, Alabama, one of the “deep Red” parts of the American South. In this case, antifascists coming from metropolitan Atlanta made the mistake of wearing “Black Bloc” and using chants that only confused the crowd and alienated popular support:
Auburn’s “White Students Union” had been agitating against “Atlanta Antifa” ahead of time. They put up posters around campus warning people against “Atlanta Antifa” as scary outsiders who might attack bystanders. The spectacle that the black bloc provided played right into this…. The spectacle of specialized antifascism undermined the concrete possibility of mass antifascism. (5590, 5619)
…to many of the students, the antifascists looked much more like the fascists (especially the “Traditionalist Worker Party,” who were dressed in all black, with helmets, and keeping a bloc formation) than they looked like Auburn students. There were some times where even we couldn’t easily tell which side people were on.xii (7809)
As it turned out, the university students at Auburn – characterised by some of the visiting activists as “stupid liberals” (5600) – were the ones who successfully shut down the Spencer speech:
Most of us would probably say that we think mass antifascism is an ideal, preferable to a “squad-versus-squad” style of antifascism. However, in practice we tended to write off the possibility that large numbers of Alabamians might actually agree with our program for fighting fascism if we actually presented it to them…. If even Southern, white football “bros” are open to running fascists out of town, then our approach and program could inspire and unite a lot more people than we expect. (5580, 5732)
It is extremely refreshing to read militant antifascists who understand that adopting an activist “uniform” and writing off whole communities as “normies” or “spectators” is part of the problem. It is precisely “the normies” who must be persuaded to become antifascists: “to prevent fascism from normalizing, we have to normalize antifascism… to keep fascism from developing a mass base, we need to build a mass base for antifascism.” (5725, 5728)
Among other helpful contributions, Matthew Lyons deals with the importance of antisemitism to fascist narratives (and its infiltration of Left-wing circles by disguising itself as anti-Zionism) by presenting a structural analysis by Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, “in which Jews (a) become concentrated in highly visible positions of relative privilege, (b) are used as scapegoats to divert popular anger away from the real centers of power and oppression, and (c) experience alternating periods of relative acceptance and intense, violent persecution” (2660). The categorisation of Jews as “abstract power” (2728), an alien presence distorting the system, is a potent source of Red-Brown crossover, even as the more conventional reactionary Right characterise Leftism and liberalism as a Jewish plot.
Finally, M., Roberto Santiago de Roock, and Joel D. Lovos give a very thoughtful and timely exposition of the need for antifascist organising in and around video games – extremely important given the role of Gamergate in giving birth to the modern radical-Right movement, and very timely considering current efforts to spark “Gamergate 2.0”.xiii While the present author is not a gamer, you don’t need to read much social media to know how much of the aesthetics of contemporary “meme politics” (on both Left and Right) come from games such as Hearts of Iron IV or Disco Elysium. The authors make the excellent point that anti-disinformation and anti-fascist tactics focus so much on Twitter, while young people spend far more time in games or in game-related spaces like Discord servers – and that fascists are actively organising in such spaces: “One survey found that among those who play online multiplayer games, 23 percent were exposed to extremist white supremacist ideology while playing.” (5804)
The authors replicate the observation in the gaming/online world that “official” or “liberal” anti-fascism often takes on the guise of State-sponsored “anti-extremism” – that is, extending the net of policing and surveillance to shut down not only fascist but Left-wing anti-system organising.xiv Again, the Three Way Fight is the model:
We think that abolitionists should organize to oppose both fascist recruitment in games and capitalist policing of games… The left is the only part of the three way fight that’s (mostly) not taking games seriously; fascists and the state have both been using games to organize, surveil, etc., as they fight each other and as they fight us. Antifascists should take gaming seriously as a space for learning, organizing, building friendships, imagining liberated futures, practicing skills needed in these futures, and mobilizing both online and in the real world. If we don’t do it, the fascists and cops will use games against us. (5762, 5776)
One very interesting observation the authors make in passing is a defence of LARPing:
We should not make fun of people for LARPing (live action role playing) as revolutionaries, as long as they know when a situation is a game and when it is a real-life conflict with life-or-death consequences (e.g., an actual riot or an actual street brawl with fascists). LARPing in low-stakes settings can be a way for people to practice and to learn from their mistakes so they’ll be more prepared to handle situations that are not games, where the consequences for failure are much higher. (5947)
A diagram of the Three Way fight, with Devin Zane Shaw’s “lines of adjacency” added