Looking from the sidelines: my shifting views on anti-fascist organizing

It might make sense to open this conversation by looking at the remarks of a number of protesters who attempted to use civil disobedience tactics to oppose fascism and white supremacy during the recent events in Charlottesville.  The first night of the fascist incursion into the city occurred on the campus of the University of Virginia in the form of a torchlight march.  In opposition to that march, a small group of clergy and others decided to protest the fascists and the Confederate memorials that they were attempting to defend.  The small group was very quickly surrounded by the fascists, and only the group of anti-fascists were willing to intervene to defend the group from the fascists.  The police, who they were looking to be arrested by, simply looked on.  The group found themselves in the position where they were defended by a group of activists that have a very different perspective on tactics and strategy. 

The responses on the part of the group in a variety of formats are instructive.  Most noted that the experience of facing the fascist mob was remarkably different than their what they previously experienced at demonstrations.  They also noted that the training they went through did not prepare them for this situation.  Most acknowledged the debt they owed to the group of anti-fascist activists.  It's a remarkable set of documents as a whole.  Some of these individuals had been involved in thousands of protests and some had only been involved in a few, but there is a consistent thread through the responses, an acknowledgement that the set of assumptions that they came in with did not correspond with the situation.  The tactics that they set out to use, which I want to add are part of a time honored and powerful tradition within activism in the country and around the globe, did not make sense here.  The group did something that we so often avoid; they acknowledged that they did not understand the conditions that they were entering into and that the tactics they used were not adequate to the situation because of that. 

It's an intellectual honesty that we admire and all too often eschew in our own practices.  However, for the purpose of this essay, I want to emphasize this quality of not knowing as one common among us who have not had significant experience confronting fascist groups.

My own experience began in that ignorance.  I entered into the world of politics through the punk scene in the Twin Cities in the early 1990's.  What I didn't know at the time is that a significant change had occurred in that scene before I entered it.  In the late 1980's a group of skinheads calling themselves the Baldies had come together to drive out the white supremacists from the Twin Cities punk subculture.  By the time I had entered the scene, this group, now reformed as the Anti-Racist Action network had driven the active white supremacist elements out of the scene and into the underground.  This meant that I could enjoy going to shows without having to worry about the kind of violence that Nazis have brought to the punk subculture, and I could enjoy participating in that community without the worry that so many have had to take on.  It's something that I took for granted at the time, but it's something that I'm profoundly grateful looking back at the situation.

My involvement with the punk scene gradually receded as I got involved in the Emma Center and other activist spaces, which led to me having different priorities.  As that shift occurred, I became aware of the Anti-Racist Action network. I was initially made aware of the network when a professor passed on some information about an ARA activist who was being charged with assault because of a confrontation with a Nazi skinhead, and I gradually became aware about community debates about the situation.  I eventually attended an ARA meeting with a friend, which translated into my initial aversion towards the group.  At that meeting, a young man showed up to the meeting looking for support from the network.  He had returned to his old neighborhood, looking to catch up with some friends, and found himself being recruited by the head of the National Socialist Movement, Jeff Schoep.  In response, he had panicked and hit Schoep on the head and stole his car, along with all the literature in that car.  The group understandably immediately set out to support the individual, who had responded to a dangerous situation as best he could.

But I had no understanding of the danger the individual was in that situation, and the reasons for his response, and I was appalled.  Rather than trying to understand why the individual or the network responded in the way they did, I dismissed them and looked to other places to be involved in activism.  I reasoned at the time that one should be opposed to such individuals but that the actions of the individual and the network were unacceptable in the face of free speech activity.  I didn't understand that fascist organizing almost always involved violence as a means and an ends in that organizing and that allowing such activities to occur creates the conditions for those groups to take over those spaces.  To put another way, fascist organizing isn't simply a matter of unpleasant speech acts but the active creation of violent and authoritarian social spaces.  Perhaps, more significantly, I had no conception of the threat posed to the young man who was being recruited and the legitimacy of his fear and vulnerability in the face of this recruitment.  The only reason I don't look back at this situation without much embarrassment is that I at least had the good sense to shut my yap and listen, rather than intervene.

From there, I got more and more involved in the activist projects of the Twin Cities.  My involvement in the Progressive Student Organization led to my participation in the anti-sanctions campaign and the broader network of radical activists in the Twin Cities.  The conflicts that eventually tore apart the PSO brought me in contact with the anarchist sections of that movement, which gradually drew me into the anti-globalization movement that was effectively brought to the attention of the world by the anti-WTO protests in Seattle.  I didn't participate in that protest, but I was at later protests in Washington D.C. and Quebec City, along with a series of confrontational protests in the Twin Cities, from the Mayday protests to the ill-advise ISAAG protests.  Those experiences drastically changed my world view and what kinds of activities should and could occur during protest.  I went from viewing Black Bloc tactics as being ill advised and unpleasant to being involved in a number of Black Bloc formations, and embraced the increasingly confrontational ethos of the times.  Perhaps more significantly,  I experienced confrontation in a variety of ways that were only previously abstractions.

These experiences led to a small group of us deciding to organize a small militant response to the upcoming KKK rally that occurred shortly after the initial boom in anti-globalization protest.  We managed to both organize a concert in opposition to the fascists and contributed a core of protesters to a small group that confronted the small group of Klan supporters within the larger opposition to the group.  At the ground level, both our activities and the larger structures of the protest were deeply problematic in ways that I can't touch on within the aegis of this essay, but the experience itself was significant.  One of the things you learn in the process of engaging in these conflicts is that the process is a lot messier than at least I initially expected.  Most of it was a lot of yelling, but there were some kicks and shoves as well.  Outsiders want conflict to be neat and easy, but never is.  Conflicts with fascists are going to messy, and if you snap the picture at the right time, the detached image can tell a damning and misleading story.  Just as significantly, we were far from the most militant group in the protest.  We went as far as to kick a fascist in the butt as he crossed the police line, but a sizable group of the counter-protesters who didn't typically attend rallies greeted the Klan supporters with rocks and fists.  The intensity of the response got to the point where anti-Klan organizers stepped in to protect the children of the supporters, although not the supporters themselves.

My experiences within that situation were fragmentary and short lived in contrast to many of the experiences of other, more serious anti-fascist protesters and I don't think they translate into any kind of expertise.  Instead, my main understanding of these situations comes from the conversations I wound up having with committed anti-fascist activists, when I eventually joined the Anti-Racist Action in 2001 or 2002.  The reasons I got involved in the network aren't terribly relevant to the discussion, but I got involved in the Minneapolis group for reasons that had more to do with my trust and affection for the members of the group and its commitment to a feminist politics than it had to do with anti-fascism.  At the same time, my involvement put me in touch with a whole range of activists that had been involved in the fight for a lot longer, and I did something that I should have done earlier, I listened and asked questions.  I heard a lot about the messy conflicts that occur within these situations, why people got involved, and the self-critical analysis of such activists.  Perhaps, most significantly, I remember talking to a group of anti-fascist activists in a small city in what I think was Indiana.  They talked about their vulnerability in the face of a town in which fascists were allowed to run free.  They couldn't go to shows or go to a bar to get a drink without the very real threat of violence.  It made me understand the conflict in a way that I previously didn't understand.  There are very real criticisms that one can make of the network, but I learned a lot from it and it's unfortunate that it doesn't still exist.

As an end-note to that experience, I should perhaps pass on one last experience that I had while a participant in the group.  We didn't have a lot of direct confrontations with the fascists, while I was in the group, but one exception was a labor organized, immigrants rights rally that the National Socialist Movement decided to protest.  Involved in the protest was the same Jeff Schoep discussed above.  Our engagement with the group was non-confrontational.  We watched them and they watched us.  It let the far more important event go on.  However, at the beginning of the event, we were approached by Keith Ellison, who was at that point, a state legislator.  Ellison had defended the young man discussed above as a lawyer and had gotten him off many if not all the charges laid against him.  He had worked with a number of ARA activists over the years and was at that time, an ally.  He had helped both Anti-Racist Action and the Arise! collective when they were bizarrely accused of terrorism by a cynical and opportunist sheriff's department after 9-11.  Ellison's response on seeing the NSM was to suggest in a deadpan voice that perhaps he could hit them with a tire iron this time and that we could defend him. With a change in perspective through a long education, an incident that was so shocking and outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior at the time became something that was so easily understood it could be easily passed off as an amusing anecdote.

It's been a while since I've been within those circles, but they deeply shaped my views on the subject, and I've continued to listen to those involved in these fights, particularly in the recent moment, where I have been on the sidelines because of a combination of health and employment issues.  I do still find myself in debates over the tactics though.  When I find myself in debates over these tactics, I find myself confronting a set of assumptions held by my opponents that I frequently held many years ago, and like many converts, I find myself somewhat less than patient with the views that I once held.  I suppose it's a common bad habit of the convert. One one hand, I should probably be more patient with people who I once resembled.  On the other hand, its frustrating to hear argumentation that is so fraught with unwarranted assumptions and badly thought out premises.  For instance, there is a tendency to collapse militant anti-fascism with Black Bloc tactics, transforming those transitory groupings put together in response to particular emergencies into a sort of homogeneous, organized group.  Such tactics have been recently embraced by a lot of militant anti-fascist groups, but they weren't a dominant tactic within ARA organizing, and don't represent the sole militant strain of action against fascists in the present.  Just as significantly, we can see in the case of the major protests that the groups that have embraced these tactics have taken different approaches in different situations.  We're discussing networks and an umbrella of tactics, and critiques need to deal with that reality.

Much of this debate is driven by the representation of these protests by the dominant media. We frequently immediately link violence against fascists to those engaged in Black Bloc tactics or militant anti-fascists in opposition to a group of peaceful protesters, but a lot of people really don't like these groups and will throw down against them in ways that get erased in that sort of narrative.  Certainly, this was the case in the way the dominant media talked about the confrontations at the protest against Milo Yiannopoulis in Berkeley.  Most of the activists who were on the ground for that protest talked about the forms of cooperation that occurred between those participating in the Black Bloc and other protesters against fascist provocateurs, but this aspect of the protests was utterly effaced by the media who presented a far different story, one that transformed fascists looking for a fight into peaceful protesters assaulted by a mob that had infiltrated an otherwise peaceful protest.  Images taken out of context created this narrative and there was no effort to put those images into any real context. Like myself several years previously, those reporters made no effort to understand the context of the situation or the nature of the groups that they were writing about.  They assumed that they were a group of individuals engaged in unpleasant speech acts rather than what they were, an authoritarian mob seeking to create a racist and authoritarian society.

Presidential Endorsement

       Given the nature of the current presidential election, I thought I would break away from the typical focus and perspective of this blog in order to make an intervention into presidential politics with an endorsement.  No doubt, the 10-30 readers will make the difference at the polls, marking who will win and who will lose the election.  It's a heavy burden.  With that in mind, Work Resumed on the Tower formally endorses.... Dinesh D'Souza's racist caricature of Barack Obama.  The racist caricature of Barack Obama has the most consistently anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist positions of all nationally viable candidates, including the third parties.  He has recognized that we need to challenge the fundamental structures of the capitalist world system, from the informal and formal structures of racism and sexism that define that system to the legacy of imperialism and conquest that played a foundational role in the construction of our current regime of accumulation, which has benefited the very few at the expense of the many.  In addition,he recognizes the perhaps central role that white supremacy plays in the continuing legitimization of this system.  Most notably, Dinesh D'Souza's racist caricature of Obama has recognized that the predominant role of the United States plays a significant role in the reproduction of the forms of domination and exploitation existing in the world today.  He recognizes that our nation has taken the place of the United Kingdom in this role, and has creatively linked the two imperial systems in order to critique our current role in preserving a world system that systemically evacuates resources to a small group of metropolitan centers, and extracts the labor from billions in order to let a small group of primarily white men live like gods.  In response, he proposes to radically transform both the role of United States in the current world system, and therefore create the opportunity to create a world system based on radically different principles, the principles of taking what one needs and giving what one can.  He advocates, in short, the destruction of the legacy of the past 500 years of domination in the name of a common humanity.

       It's unfortunate that the only coherent statement in support of these policies, policies that would link the United States to the broad masses of humanity that make up this planet to create a world based on the principles of mutual aid and solidarity, is found in a racist caricature of a mainstream, bourgeois politician.  It is perhaps even more unfortunate that anyone outside of the small group of the very wealthy would vote against a candidate for expressing these principles.

Informal Thoughts on Privilege

      I've been giving the concept of privilege a lot of thought recently, primarily in response to some of the criticisms that have been made recently from a number of perspectives.  Rather than taking my usual approach of close reading and critique, I thought I would put my thoughts down on the concept with a slightly more informal approach.  The usefulness of the concept of privilege largely comes out of its ability to provide a sort of conceptual lens to understand the often personal and informal problems that arise in groups of ostensible peers, particularly within radical and progressive activist circles.  After all, the framework of privilege largely arises out of W.E.B. DuBois' effort to understand the inability to produce inter-racial forms of working class solidarity within his analysis of the reconstruction period in his 1930's text Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.  DuBois argues that these alliances collapse due to the formal and informal privileges offered to white workers in order to keep them committed to the cross-class white nationalist formation of the United States, or to use David Roediger's later term developed out of this framework, white workers are offered a kind of psychic wage to compensate for other modes of inequality, a sort of wage of whiteness, to use his vocabulary.

     The concept of privilege then has its origins in the attempt to understand the inability to produce radical political assemblages within the United States.  However, it would be possible to draw other genealogies of the concept.  For instance, a history of privilege could be created out the long and multiple feminist analyses, produced over the past century, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's analysis of the treatment of boys and girls for instance, or earlier thoughts.  We can see the need for this analysis arise out of most movements responding to a multiplicity of oppressions.  In each case, the analysis points out the unthought benefits assumed by a dominant group, or structure.  In many cases, such as the sex/gender system or structures of race, these forms of inequality were deliberately created in order to resist counter-systemic politics from forming, and some cases which those structures tie into modes of normalization such as homophobia, but in other cases, such as disability issues, the slights were unintended.  What a lens of privilege allowed for an ethical critique of those practices of inequality, in effect creating an analysis and framework of micro-power in the everyday structures of communal life.

     However, as the concept of privilege has become increasingly institutionalized, a number of intellectuals have tried to transform privilege into a lens that explains larger political phenomenon, the larger structures of capitalist accumulation, for instance.  The simple problem is that the notion of privilege does not explain the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and structures of violence and brutality associated with it, nor the institutional structures of white supremacy, or the structures of domination within our sex/gender system.  Attempts to do so produce a sort of atomism, assuming that the larger structures of our society are a sort of expansion of the small interpersonal relationships that exist in social movements and daily life.  They miss the obvious fact that these relationships are an effect of those larger structures, and a reinforcing mechanism, not an explanation for them.  By doing this, they often prescribe highly personalized and individualistic methods of solving structural problems, ignoring the social movement work that is necessary to actually solve such problems.  This is not to say that our ability to cooperate and work together isn't significant, or dismissing the implicit argument that those of us who benefit from those systems need to be the ones who shift our practices for the sake of the community, but to simply point out that the analytic of privilege is insufficient, although necessary, for a radical politic. 

     Within this context, it's not surprising that the analytic plays a significant role within non-profit politics.  As a number of folks have pointed out, the non-profit structure largely exists as a mediator within structures of inequality and domination, not as entities that exist to challenge or destroy those structures.  Communist philosopher Antonio Negri notably compares them to the Benedictine monks of the middle ages, an institution that often worked to ameliorate poverty, but in order to preserve the larger system.  I don't think that this fact in and of itself neutralizes the value of the institutions that produce this kind of work, but it does mean that we as radicals need to look at these institutional structures, whether in university activism or other movement organizing, with a skeptical and critical eye.  There is no way of returning to a pure form of radical analysis of privilege.  After all, the non-profit institutions are far too intertwined with genuine counter-systemic movements, but we can rework them into a new approach to radical politics, preferably one that translates into a new historical bloc far larger than previously seen.  The analytic of privilege answer to many significant questions to inter-subjective problems to every be fully erased, for all that they symptomatize a sort of neo-liberal subjectivity and collectivity.  A new radical assemblage can only be created through an engagement with these forms, not by avoiding them.

After Labor Day

      I've never liked the idea of Labor Day.  It's clearly a refusal to recognize the real International Workers' Day, May 1st, which has been transformed into the ridiculous Law Day.  However, if we were going to be honest, Labor Day is the holiday that the United States labor movement deserves.  Without a radical transformation of that movement, a movement that aligns itself with the imperialism and racism of our ruling class, rather than toiling masses of the world.  Additionally, without a movement that challenges the structures of misogyny and patriarchy that contribute to defining the capitalist world system, we will continue to reproduce that system, rather than resist it.   In protest of that current state, I suggest skipping the propaganda posters, and watch this documentary.

A Provisional Essay on the Essays of James Baldwin: In Response to Earlier Conversations

     I've been involved in a sporadic conversation with my friend Adam for the past couple years about novelist and essayist James Baldwin.  Our conversation has primarily focused on the essays because until recently, those are the only works of Baldwin's that I had read.  Since then, I've manage to read about half of Giovanni's Room, but my engagement with the fiction is still pretty superficial.  Not surprisingly, since he is writing a chapter on Baldwin, Adam has read a number of the novels as well as the essay work.  Our conversations have focused on a particular interpretation that Adam has suggested about the essay work of Baldwin.  He has argued that there is a shift in Baldwin's work from the early essays that operate within the framework of the New York intellectuals, critiquing the forms of sentimentality in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright to his later work focused on advocacy for the struggles of the civil rights movement and the new left.

    There is certainly evidence for this position.  The early essays of Baldwin were sharply critical of the political positions and, more significantly, the aesthetic engagement of the left.  These critiques primarily focused on a critique of sentimentality. For Baldwin, "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."  The early essays focused on this form of ideological critique, focusing on the deception of conventional narratives, and their ability to legitimate systems of domination.  This analysis was turned against the work of Richard Wright, popular film, and popular periodicals.  He also turned it against the hypocrisy of the presidential campaign of the radical Progressive Party.

     Additionally, the later work showed a commitment to a number of political struggles that were previously dealt with a certain level skepticism in the earlier works.  Baldwin wrote advocacy pieces for Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and in support of the sit-in demonstrations of the civil rights moment.  As Baldwin became more popular, he also became a spokesman for the movement, representing struggles within the pages of journals and on the television.  Evidently, this new stance alienated his earlier audience, who refused to accept that a committed intellectual could also play the role of critic, abandoning the distance that they believed was crucial to the position of an honest intellectual.  From their position, Baldwin had abandoned his role as the proper liberal intellectual, taking the role as activist and advocate.

     However, even the early essays don't fall into the narrative arc of the New York intellectuals.  Baldwin was committed to the same linkage of the narratives, focusing on the relationship between sentimentality, kitsch, and totalitarianism.  But Baldwin's commitment to anti-racism brought in a different dimension to Baldwin's work from the beginning.  That commitment pushed Baldwin towards a critique of European civilization as such.  He recognized that the concept of race, and the forms of domination and colonialism entangled within it, was intimately linked to the European world system, a system that the United States was the latest beneficiary of.  However, the unique role of slavery had disrupted that system, breaking down the border between the colonizer and the colonized.  That contradiction is linked to the breakdown of the system.  Baldwin noted in the final essay of the collection, "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." ("Stranger in the Village", 129)  Although, Baldwin's later work would present a far more pessimistic vision of the 'lie' of race, it still turned the critical tools of the New York intellectuals against their vaunted Western tradition.
  
  Additionally, the linkage between Baldwin and the New Left was considerably less amicable then Baldwin's critics would have thought.  Baldwin was frequently seen as a member of the establishment by groups such as the Black Panthers, and his relationship with the radicals in those movements were frequently quite tense.  Rather than falling into a simple one-sided image of the struggles as advocate, Baldwin continued to attempt to break out of the deceptive structure of conventional narrative structures.  For Baldwin, the advantage of the new social movements was their challenge to the European social order now dominated by the United States.  It was a critique of the lie of whiteness.  Rather than representing a radical shift in the thinking process of Baldwin, the later essays operated as a continuation of both his criticism of the social symbolic order and the conventional narratives that supported it.  The difference between the periods is historical, rather than a shift in Baldwin's thought.  Instead, the real transformation could be linked to a set of challenges to the symbolic system, through anti-colonial struggles, civil rights, etc.

   The new collected set of essays collecting the material unpublished in the earlier set of essays published by the Library of America contribute to a greater sense of continuity in the narratives produced by Baldwin.  That central theme can be reduced to the title of one the essays of the collection, "The White Problem."   Whiteness constitutes the central contradiction, framing the lie called race.  The lie of whiteness and the lie of race refuses to recognize the intimacy of relations that exist in the United States within the forms of domination that define it.  This refusal to recognize this fact is crucial to maintaining these modes of dubious privilege.  Furthermore, they are maintained through the mediocrity of popular conventional narratives.  In effect, the modes of critique offered by the New York intellectuals against mass culture, against the supposed totalitarianism of the 2nd World are turned against the so-called free world of the United States, revealing its untruth, its modes of domination, etc.  At the heart of that system is the abasement and domination of blackness, contributing to the abasement of everyone.  This problematic is probably most directly expressed in a small section of the essay, "On Being White... And Other Lies."  He states,

    "Just so the white community as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political representatives.  No nation in the world , including England is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre.  I will not name names--I will leave that to you.
     But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen.  And how did they get that way?  By deciding that they were white.  By opting for safety instead of life.  By persuading themselves that a black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life.  By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy.  By informing human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect.  And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.

     And they have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white."