Labyrinths: the left’s path to triumph is never simple
AN ARMED PEOPLE?
Roma, Spring 1999
Long before the Nibelungen mythology spread in Teutonic lands, in the ancient and isolated lands south of the Alps singular legends abounded that say a lot about how these peninsular peoples still think today … and how they dream. Etymologists explain that the Latin noun, legend, deriving from ancient Rome’s spoken Latin language, refers to ‘things to be read’. Those legends—those things to be read—chronicle human events that lie within the realm of possibility and relate miracles that could happen and are thus partially-preferably believed by all. Therefore they were handed down from generation to generation, evolving and transforming in the telling and in the passing of time. A millennium before the Nibelungen emerged, Romulus and Remus appeared on a hilly country apparently predestined to become the center of the star-shaped city of Rome. Maybe the two boys were not really suckled by a she-wolf and maybe they did not found the eternal city but nonetheless statues to them mark Rome today and their enduring legend is taught in schools and known by every Italian as something to be read. The mother of the two boys was allegedly the virgin priestess of the goddess Vespa, made pregnant by Mars, the god of war. According to the legend their fearful relatives considered the two boys ‘more than human’ and entrusted a servant to kill them. Instead the servant abandoned them by the River Tiber where they were saved by the she-wolf and fed by a woodpecker. The boys grew up as leaders of bands of shepherds, became outlaws, abducted the women of the nearby Sabine mountains, procreated and founded a people and the city of Rome. It is remarkable how legends born in different places and times are also similar: the mother of Jesus, Maria, recalls the virgin priestess of Rome; the presence of animals and shepherds mark the story of the founding of a new religion and that of an empire … an empire which itself became a new faith. Man’s molecules, though stable in number are by their nature unpredictable and maverick and rogue. They too rebel and wander, apparently lost somewhere in the DNA, then return to participate in the evolvement of new peoples and races. Similarly, man himself is unpredictable: if he takes one course he becomes a doctor of medicine and works in a clinic for the poor in an African village; if he takes another route, he might attempt to found a thousand year empire.
As a young man, my boss, friend and perhaps more, Editor-In-Chief Rinaldo Rivera, had worshipped the persistent legend of his Partisan father, a historical legend more colorful than the gray fascist times, war times, in which he had lived. Pride filled Rinaldo’s voice when he said that he couldn’t remember when his father was not a hero, who at the same time—he stressed—for him and his comrades in the Italian Resistance in WWII was also the archetype of the good man.
At the newspaper we all know that history well. When Rinaldo Rivera was born in 1924 in Reggio-Emilia, the Communist Party had just emerged from a split in the Socialist Party and joined the International. The sheet metal worker, Ferdinando Rivera, was one of the founders of the new workers party that two years later was dissolved by Mussolini, its press suppressed, and most of its leaders outlawed, exiled and jailed, some tortured and killed. Rinaldo’s father escaped from a fascist political prison in Sardinia to help organize the underground anti-fascist opposition and, during the war, the Resistenza against the dictator.
“My father was clandestine as long as I remember,” Rinaldo boasted. The entire Italian Left came to know that Ferdinando Rivera was ambushed and killed by Fascist troops in 1944 though there were conflicting claims as to where his comrades buried him; in fact many people believed the legend that he was still alive. The majority of the Communist Party accepted that a grave in the hills near Cuneo in Piemonte contained the remains of their militant leader and erected a monument in his honor there. Others however believed a mound among a group of graves in the Alps near Bormio was his burial site, where a second monument stands.
“I felt destined to take his place,” Rinaldo Rivera told me. “In World War II, I hid out on rooftops in the center of Florence to escape the draft until the day I could join the partisans in the Tuscan mountains. Because of the isolation and the loneliness I felt up there on those gray roofs among the chimney stacks I was often tempted to return to earth even though I would have rather died or would’ve tried to escape to Soviet Russia rather than serve one hour in Mussolini’s army.”
After university studies in the post-war, Rinaldo Rivera became a functionary in the press and information department of the PCI. By that time the Italian Communist Party led by Palmiro Togliatti had opted for the democratic path to Socialism. Rinaldo followed the main body of the Party. Not only was he a hero of the Resistance like his father, he was a co-author of its history. He accompanied Togliatti on missions to Moscow, and much later he accepted the break of the Italian Communist Party with the Soviet Union. While writing his one hundred-year history of social Europe, he developed theories that led to the emergence of the Euro-Communist movement of the 1980s which today he admits was an historical-ideological error. Meanwhile the son of a legend became a legend himself of the Italian and the European Left.
Stories and anecdotes about the grand old man circulate today among his newspaper staff in Rome and in his native Reggio-Emilia. ‘Here is my Beretta, my resent to you,’ Rinaldo Rivera allegedly said to a young man in Reggio in 1960 when he gave him his military pistol that he had used in the Resistance. ‘Someday you will need it.’ Though in his heart the Rinaldo of then still believed in the dream of a Communist revolution in Italy, he could never have imagined that the young man would become the chief of the Red Brigades, condemned and execrated by the official PCI for trying to realize that dream.
Over the years I’ve come to know two distinct Rinaldo Riveras. One is the esteemed writer, journalist and commentator on Italian life whom even right-wing politicians and journalists recognize as a true democrat and a great Italian. On his 75th birthday the entire nation paid its respects to him. Only extremists of Right and Left hate him for what he is. Democratic values are not empty words for the public Rinaldo Rivera. He has personally been down the path of temptation; he knows both Stalinism and Fascism from personal experience and stands like a rock in defense of European social values … but he has no faith in a free market. While we were watching TV footage from Genoa of the American President and our Premier together, he whispered that he didn’t know which of the two men he detested most.
Not so deep underneath the surface there is another Rinaldo Rivera, a Rinaldo Rivera modeled on his uncompromising father. That romantic Rinaldo Rivera dreams of the lost revolution. I began to understand that other Rinaldo one spring day when we were picnicking at Ostia Antica—Rinaldo and his wife, Lucia, Marco Maraini, a couple of other friends from the newspaper and Melissa and I. Since he prefers talking with young people he and I were sitting on an ancient wide stone in the shade apart from the others. His hair and mustache were full, his shoulders and arms still muscular. “Our world is about to change,” he said that day, squaring his shoulders and sitting as erectly as possible on our rock, assuming the tone he uses in his famous eleven a.m. editorial meetings which at seventy-five years old he still conducts. “Italy too must change dramatically because the country is on a steady downward spiral … down, down, down in its decline. Change in our country will perforce be a violent change. And your generation is going to bring about that change, Gael. All of you will face difficult choices,” he said, as if his entire past, recorded and documented, were parading before him.
“At that moment you will have to make the right choices. No more repetitions of the past when hero worship guided choices. The people back then applauded Mussolini, as their saviour. Now they applaud other populists as their heroes. We Italians always need a hero to resolve our national problems, a high commissioner, a tsar, a duce, to whom we wilfully give full powers ... and often ourselves. Why is that? First, because we do not know who we are in this great mixture of races. And also because the Republic of Italy has no real sovereignty. We are an occupied country. We have always belonged to someone else. We Italians suffer from the DID you told me about. Our people are from nowhere. Meet a young Italian abroad today and ask him where he’s from and he’s likely to say he’s not from anywhere or at the most that he is European … or perhaps a citizen of the world. But people of the older generation may still tell you the place they are from, as I say that I’m from Scandicci, Toscana. That’s my home, whether I live there or not. A Roman whose grandfather came from the Abruzzo identifies himself as an Abruzzese. A friend, also a Tuscan like me, from Pisa at the very edge of Tuscany, says he feels like an Etruscan. Confusion, you might say. Hero worship. Loss of identity. Belonging to a place with no sovereignty over itself means to belong to something uncertain, inchoate, foreign. So you spend your life looking for substitutes to which you can belong.
“One risk facing your generation is spontaneous revolution—mind you I don’t mean revolution as such. Spontaneous revolution or simply rebellion can never work. Eventually, spontaneous revolution peters out. And the vacuum that it leaves behind permits the rise of even more powerful authoritarianism and ends up reinforcing capitalism. My generation faced a choice just after the war. It was either the revolution that our fathers fought for and that I, a twenty-two-year old ex-Partisan, desired, or it was the democratic process that our leader Togliatti chose. His was a political decision. A decision for Italy. Nationalism. For a revolution then in our occupied and defeated country would have been a spontaneous uprising and would have been crushed and a pure dictatorship installed by the victorious powers. After much tribulation and self-searching I went with Togliatti.”
He stood up and walked around our rock in one of his characteristic poses—the elbow of his right arm braced in the hand of the other, his right hand under his chin. The others had fallen silent. Though he spoke softly, his words carried and were intended for all to hear: “I should warn you, Gael, that once you become infected by the idea of revolution, the revolutionary spirit remains in your guts forever. Someday you too will have to make that choice. You can choose either path. Whatever you choose though, who will be able to say that you were wrong?”
Rinaldo Rivera was not talking over my head. I understood him. He had been disillusioned that the real revolution never came about. It was in his blood.
“Why do you think we fought in the Resistance?” he asked, sitting back down beside me. “We accelerated the defeat of Fascism even though when we began the fight its end was already in sight. The sooner the better we thought, for we believed that the Resistance was in reality a warm-up for the real war—the definitive war for social justice, the beginning of the revolutionary struggle. We were ready. You have to keep in mind that back then the German model of Socialism had long since failed and we had the Soviet model before our eyes.”
I now realize that I understood then that he was speaking to me personally. He intended it as a lesson drawn from his own experience. Sometimes he lowered his voice as if wanting to confide in me alone. For a moment quiet would settle around us. Or maybe the quiet was in my head. Quiet and confusion. He had no reason for putting on intellectual airs there in Ostia Antica. Nor is it his habit to talk aimlessly. He never wastes words. Maybe I had already made my choice too: I also feel a sense of a mission in life, a mission that I must somehow complete. That it is futile to try to evade. Though most people seem to go about their daily lives unfettered by such concerns, sure of themselves, confident of what they think they believe in and therefore in their actions, some of us spend our lives trying to first understand what our mission is … then to fulfilling it. In any case Rinaldo Rivera’s thinking is not just theory. He wants me to benefit from his experience and make certain that I do not err. Yet he wants me to choose.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap] few days later Rinaldo asked me to drop by his apartment on Aventine Hill the following afternoon, the implication being that it concerned something of significance and moreover, personal. In any case visits to his residence were rare and special. The few times I had been there I’d noted that the windows of his apartment were always wide open, his house bright and effulgent—reflecting, I thought rather poetically, the light in his eyes—so unlike most Italian homes of closed windows and locked doors and in marked contrast to his youthful isolation on the Florentine rooftops. He’d learned, I told myself, from his subsequent political sorrows and disappointments to search for life’s deeper joys in order to transcend those pains and to concentrate on lasting accomplishments … and, I believed, in order to leave a mark as his father had done.
We sat on a covered terrace. As usual he was dressed in jacket and tie. On the table between us lay a brown paper bag. Somewhat theatrically he opened it and took out an object wrapped in a purple felt cloth. “It’s a Luger, Gael.” He shifted the pistol reverently from hand to hand as if it were porcelain … as if he were estimating its weight. As he handed it to me, reaching through a ray of the afternoon sun, the black weapon glistened as if it were polished daily,
“I took it off the body of a German officer about my age I had just killed. The first and only time I ever killed a man right in front of me. It was a bitter moment. He didn’t have a chance to explain himself. Though it was war, I sometimes wish he could have explained his life choices ... if he’d even had choices.”
I was surprised at the Luger’s weight. I turned it over and felt its violence in my hands as I had my uncle’s rifle and again saw the squirrel I shot. I put it back on the table.
“I want you to have it,” he said, polishing it carefully with the felt, as I imagined he did often. “When the time of choice comes this pistol should be a symbol of the choice you are making. Put it away, Gael. Hide it. Bury it. But don’t forget it. When you make your choice—maybe the same choice I made—you can either put it away forever as I am doing in this moment in which I give it to you. Or, if you choose the revolutionary path then you have your first weapon ready.”
I felt his eyes upon me as I again picked up the pistol. I held it in my hands and comprehended Rinaldo’s vision of the pistol as more than a firearm. A pistol is commitment; it is symbolic of extreme unlimited commitment. A hand gun, I felt in that instant, is revolutionary. I felt awe. And fear. The fire descended into the back of my shoulder and spread to my neck and down the center of my back. On a personal level I was over-sensitive to such weapons because of the memory of my gun-loving uncle who beat up kids. I had never had any kind of firearm. I had never shot a pistol. What did I want with a pistol? Nothing at all. I had nothing to do with firearms. Nothing whatsoever. I considered the gun anti-communitarian, anti-socialist, a police kind of thing. I favor peace. An inward feeling. An emotion. And a stance. Peace and trust. Peace in myself. But what kind of peace can you feel with a pistol in your hands? You can’t just take things as they come … not everything, Gael. But still, I now understand that Rinaldo had in mind the primary battle like the battle the partisans had fought … the battle for weapons. Where were they to get them? The rifles and pistols they needed against the fascists. How was a disarmed people to find arms? A mystery. From one day to the next. They needed guns to battle the enemy. Where could they get them? Only from the enemy himself. Those who deserted from the defeated Italian army brought their hand arms with them to the macchia in our mountains. But the others, the old men and the kids too young for the army, had nothing. No way to defend themselves.
“In those times too, war times, weapons for the unarmed people came from the dead,” he said as if reading my mind, “from the Germans and the Fascists we killed.”
I began feeling something sacred about this pistol; Rinaldo transmitted that awe to me that day. But I did not feel peaceful when I held it.
The terrorists of the Red Brigades of the 1970s said they had felt the same awe when they first held a pistol. Awe for the death they could cause. Awe also for its symbolism. Perhaps many of them had earlier opposed the pistol, as a symbol of death and dominance. Most of them had never even held a pistol before they opted for the armed revolutionary struggle. And the first thing they had to do was arm themselves. They bought them here and there or other revolutionary movements helped arm them. Then quickly they learned to use their weapons.
The cocked pistol became the symbol of their revolutionary movement, eventually supported morally by some three million Italians who as a rule still do not own guns. The armed Brigadists reproduced the pistol’s legendary image on their leaflets bearing the pistol and the five-pointed star on a red background. Everybody in Italy knew the pistol and the star was the symbol of the armed struggle for Socialism-Communism. As if the pistol like the star influenced human destiny. The pistol in those leaden years became a minor deity. The star and the pistol became synonymous, a symbol that became a popular Italian legend that from time to time resurfaces to favor justice when socio-political oppression threatens. The Red Brigades were defeated but the lesson learned then was that revolutionary actions always require guns. No getting around that reality. Still, cruel capitalism controls the dissemination of arms as it likes. First let everybody have arms. Then militarize the police: gas, heavy weapons, tanks. So that rebellious people must decide. Some choose armed underground-guerilla resistance: it worked in Russia. It worked in Cuba, It worked in Nicaragua. The first actions of the Red Brigades in Italy and the Rote Armée Faktion in Germany aimed at arming themselves and shaming the useless temerity and foolhardiness of non-violent protest. “If you follow your star, you can’t fail,” Curcio once told me in an interview in his prison cell. “Like Dante and Virgil,” he said, “when at the end of their long voyage through the infernal regions, they again see the sky.” For me the star-pistol image came to reflect the sense of liberation you feel in your dreams when you escape from a closed place. My belief that the star-pistol image symbolizes sublime actions proved that I too changed just as Rinaldo Rivera had done.
While Rinaldo spoke in his quiet way as the Rome sun set that afternoon I recalled in a déja vu the same hesitation in Nullo’s voice when at the Giordano Bruno monument on Campo de’ Fiori he spoke of his relationship with Lenin and Bruno. He explained that the Leninist idea of a chain reaction of anti-capitalist revolutions stood as a certainty driving armed left-wing terrorists in Europe of the 1970s and 80s, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Faction in Germany. I had thought that though intellectually he held to Bruno, Lenin still lived in his heart. Lenin, Nullo often said, believed that workers in the developed countries would eventually disrupt capitalist war-making. To some extent the outcome of the Vietnam War had fulfilled his predictions, even though it was youth and not workers who helped most to end that capitalist war. Unfortunately, Nullo explained, brainwashed workers have remained attached to their tiny piece of the capitalist pie … too often its ally. Today, as millions of workers lose their jobs in Europe, the working class is stirring as in 1917. Riots and revolts flare up here and there. Perhaps in the beginning it will be a war among the poor, whites against the rest, natives against immigrants, homeless against landlords, but a war which inevitably will turn against the bourgeois masters of all. That uprising is not only fantasy in the USA where the war quietly rages only under the surface. That day Nullo had quoted Lenin; “As long as Capitalism and Socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. In the end one or the other will triumph. Either Socialism will triumph throughout the world or the most reactionary capitalist imperialism will win, the most savage imperialism which is out to throttle the rest of the world. That apparent imperialist triumph came to be called globalization. Today,” Nullo said, “capitalism’s victory has soured in the arrogance of power.”
A few years earlier I would have been eager to use Rinaldo’s pistol for real. Now doubts cloud my vision. In that moment on his terrace I wished he would finish speaking. But I also would have liked to feel again the same convictions I did earlier in my life. I felt extreme regret … almost shame for not recognizing and holding to my dream mission. I’m still a beginner in life, I excused myself. An innocent. My inner self trembled. And ever so briefly I felt things moving toward night’s darkness where, I knew, both more doubt and fear reside.
I turned the pistol over in my hands again and again. I closed one eye and aimed it left and right, and then again placed it on the table between us. I knew then as I have known each time I secretly take it from its cache at home and examine it that the pistol, like the falling star, also symbolizes the dark night of death. Rinaldo Rivera’s pistol is a constant reminder. So I still do not know whether I would fire into the face of my enemy as he did. The same doubt I had that day in Genoa when I aimed my camera at that killer: if my camera had been a pistol would I have shot to kill?
Often during the nineties when the vilest reactionaries of the capitalist system ruled the USA and oligarchs ran Russia, when the viciousness of the capitalist character became apparent, when the reflection of their murderous nature showed forth for all but the blind to see, I had fallen into temptation. Washington and NATO had Italy by the balls. In the South the resurrected secret Gladio army was poised for more action. Action to execute their plan of the total fascistification of Italy … of Europe. Hurry! Hurry! All good capitalists, rally around. Hurry! Crush the Left. The USSR had collapsed. Italian Communists were excluded from the government. Pariahs again. Step after step the Communist Party had degenerated into new obscurities. At the same time, neo-Fascists, anarchists, sections of the Secret Service, the Mafia, Masonic lodges, monarchists, Catholic fanatics, and an assortment of extremists pressured the soft dictatorship for a return to authoritarianism. Again I felt that the Left should also rise up. Again armed. From time to time I lift a floorboard in our pantry, take out the pistol and hold it in my hands. I hold it in two hands and point it around the room and try to imagine firing it into the face of a capitalist-imperialist pig. A loud voice shouts into my brain that it is the right thing to do. While most people are turning their backs on the real struggle and wallowing in their economic well-being I tell myself that I want to do the right thing. Inside the pistol’s reflection, I search for myself. But my doubts persist. Is it even me resisting temptation? Is the pistol the point? Is my participation the point? I can never find the words to describe my precise feelings about the direction my commitment in life should take. Feelings are so momentary. They are not the same as memory of words or people. So much more intimate, personal, that words can seldom describe them, as if they were not really part of memory. It is not easy to find the right words. Yet we need words, the right words. There are names and people and things, there is beauty and the quiet of my father, the consciousness of being alive and thinking so why not one word for a fleeting feeling? Without that word, only a kind of metaphysical exile remains. Sometimes I feel I am nearly there.
I project myself into the place of the early Red Brigadists during the Seventies. The first Brigadists. The authentic ones. I imagine them cut off from their past, cut off from their real life, their links with family, friends, Party and society. They are living in pure time, time shorn of attachments and measures and signposts and they themselves becoming legends. At first I imagined with envy that their time too was authentic. Then I wondered if they felt that their lives were only an interval and that time itself had stopped. Maybe they feared time without end. I understood that there was no place for love in their pure time. When my time arrived, when the successive Brigadists had long since lost their original ideals and had been infiltrated and turned by the intelligence services, I came to realize that since they lived outside time they had become indifferent, indifferent because they had learned that time tends to destroy everything, that ultimately everything comes to seem ephemeral.
Yet for many years they believed in the revolution. I was jealous of their
early convictions, their zeal and their courage and their freedom to make that choice. They also made me feel uneasy. Inferior. I felt cowardly when I read of the attack by the Left—of which I was a part—on the Red Brigades, so dedicated but simultaneously so lost. Intellectually—as I imagined Rinaldo Rivera—I understood that they were somehow the enemy of our democracy, such as it was. Another Left … but still, confusingly but above all, no less the enemy of capitalism. So that I still reserve a special corner for the Red Brigades in my heart. They too are present in my blood. They are one of the forces in the wheel of my life. My-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend thinking. Though intellectually I try to believe I was right in my choice, I feel that they were not wrong either. Their underground life reminds me of the sacred sites of the American Indians; they lived in dangerous places, the places their feet tread were lethal but sacred. For me the path of armed struggle would have been like a prolonged peak experience forever at the summit of a mountain, an orgasm without end, too intense to bear. I was on my once-in-a-lifetime emotional binge, pleasurable to the extreme. I realize now that total happiness (happiness? I sometimes detest that word.) would have been within reach if I had been capable of playing the part that I denied. Like my denial of my Isabel now of so long ago, the choice then would have been my chance for an instant of transcendence, the choice that few are capable of making.
I think the combination of Rinaldo Rivera’s influence and the image of the pistol he gave me has held me on a different course. I chose to use other weapons. Again I hid away the Luger. However, the sensation of something lost has remained. Not unlike the lost places and times of ancient Roma. I have lived between the world I accepted and the legendary world I could have chosen and I feel like a stateless refugee. I wonder if this compromise is what my real life was meant to be. Suspense, uncertainty, doubt, always hanging by a thread to the present course, living a misplaced life, and the awareness that there was something more important for me to do in life. Was I—am I—in the wrong time and place, I wonder? Am I living the wrong life?
At staff meetings I study Rinaldo Rivera’s face searching for signs that he too feels he erred, that he had betrayed his father. That he had betrayed himself. Sometimes I see a certain flash of nostalgia in his eyes and I wonder.
“Parents,” he commented to me one day concerning an article on the waning revolutionary spirit in Europe, “do not make revolutionaries. We have to hold our children in our arms, comfort them and put them to bed at night. That’s why parents favor nonviolence. Is that our best hope? I doubt it. And now society as we have known it is unraveling and desperation is spreading, and everything changes. Parents are one thing, solid, the heart of human society, but non-parents are the fighters. There are many things fathers and mothers cannot do.”
Nonetheless, I continue to feel the necessity of discovery. At times I feel I am one person living inside the body of a totally different person. I feel a need for unity. I believe Rinaldo too feels the same duality. While I was still in high school in America my father used to say I was like a zebra in my desire for heroic extravagance. He called that impulse “bourgeois individualism”. At the time I did not realize the extent of his criticism. Sometimes I wonder if Giustina’s death had not been the signal to change. I had lost Isabel, then my two-year old daughter … and with her my innocence. When I speak with Rinaldo about such metaphysical matters he never tells me what to do. Once he told me I was right, that unlike art, history never stands still. It develops. But he always adds that I should remember that “history or not, in the end we are all terribly alone.”
Though the secret Rinaldo dreams of revolutionary change, he takes a firm stand against terrorism by Europeans in Europe. He warns that it inevitably leads to civil war, foreign intervention and the end of democracy. Like the Pope and the Church he stands for survival and continuity of the remains of the Party. “I am a democrat,” he proclaims at the editorial meetings he has molded in his own image. He follows his journalists closely, permitting no deviations or dips into any ideology based on terrorist violence. Although he admired and loved the Red Brigades, they were his ideological enemy, a conclusion that still haunts me and sometimes seems as intolerable as it is contradictory.
“Once terrorism walks in, all hell unfolds,” he said in a widely quoted pronouncement. “We have to be acutely aware of our realities.” When he pronounces those words I always blush inwardly, I think out of shame for him. He has come to regard himself as a Socialist with a proud Communist heritage. Yet he still floats around the edges of the new left alignment replacing the Communist Party, occasionally darting in like a Vietcong guerrilla warrior to influence major decisions and then disappearing again, to fight another day. In day-to-day life I imitate him … but with reservations.
Main photo: Still from Alain Resnais' La Guerre est Finie (1966), with Yves Montand, Ingrid Thulin, Genevieve Bujold. The script was written by political activist and anti-Franquista, Jorge Semprun.
GAITHER STEWART Senior Editor, European Correspondent } Gaither Stewart serves as The Greanville Post European correspondent, Special Editor for Eastern European developments, and general literary and cultural affairs correspondent. A retired journalist, his latest book is the essay asnthology BABYLON FALLING (Punto Press, 2017). He’s also the author of several other books, including the celebrated Europe Trilogy (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll and Time of Exile), all of which have also been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com. His latest assignment is as Counseling Editor with the Russia Desk. His articles on TGP can be found here. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
Translated by Eugenia Recently, the American journal The National Interest published an article with a telling title: “5 Reasons Russia and China Might Not Be Able to Sink a U.S. Aircraft Carrier”(http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/5-reasons-russia-china-might-not-be-able-sink-us-aircraft-22471?page=2). The author of the article discusses these reasons in detail. All of them are, by the way, pretty self-evident. The first one turned out to be (do you believe this?) that “the American aircraft carrier is big and fast . . . “ Such is a collection of simplistic propagandist clichés that the American propaganda machine is pounding into the head of the Western common man. It is important to understand that the National interest in not some “yellow” paper; this in an analytical journal that is expected to offer responsible and professional publications. A Large And Fast Coffin With A Propeller OK, the first thesis. The American aircraft carrier is indeed large and fast. It has 25 decks; its maximal height is 80 meters; it displaces 100,000 tons of water and can carry 70, or even up to 90, aircraft of different types. Unfortunately, one small detail spoils this lovely picture: a large target is easier to hit! But the Americans simply cannot make their aircraft carriers smaller. The reason is simple: they are insanely expensive. The carriers have to be made in such enormous size, simply because if they are made smaller, more of them will be needed. Flexibility of the American aircraft carrier fleet would in such case increase, but the price would skyrocket. Judge by yourself: a modern aircraft carrier costs the US approximately $13 billions (that is how much the newest “Gerald Ford” cost), and the carrier air wing (the Navy version of F-35) based of the carrier costs additional $7 billions. Plus, there are the ships of the “carrier strike group” – multiple guided missile warships, destroyers equipped with Aegis combat systems, and stealthy attack submarines. Thus, one such groups costs the Americans around $50 billions! And, by the way, these $50 billions are never able to move as quickly as the “expert” in the National Interest asserts . . . But in America nobody is concerned with such details. The author does not shy away from stating: “The aircraft carriers are constantly moving when deployed at up to 35 miles per hour – fast enough to outrun submarines – finding and tracking them is difficult. Within 30 minutes after a sighting by enemies, the area within which a carrier might be operating has grown to 700 square miles; after 90 minutes, it has expanded to 6,000 square miles”. It sound great but in reality not one American aircraft carrier can reach this speed. The maximal speed that it can maintain – for a limited time – is 30 knots. The key word here is LIMITED time. If anyone thinks that an aircraft carrier can immediately upon entering the open sea accelerate to 30 knots (almost 56 km per hour) and keep racing on the waves, he is very much mistaken. This is impossible. In reality, 95% of their time American aircraft carriers move in an economy mode at a speed no faster than 14 knots (about 26 km/hour). When airplanes take off or land on the carrier, the carrier is seriously limited in its ability to change speed or course. An aircraft carrier is not a bike. If this floating airdrome turned from side to side all the time, pilots would not be able to make landings. Another small detail: who would give to an aircraft carrier 30 min so it could escape from the battle zone? Even the old Soviet missile “Granit” (note that the Americans still do not have anything like it), which our nuclear submarine cruisers of 949-project “Antey” type are armed with, fired from its maximal distance would reach its target in just slightly more than 500 second. This means that when a missile is fired, an American aircraft carrier would have time to get away from the point of its detection at its maximal speed to no more than 7.5 km. Such distance is definitely within the range covered by the self-targeting mechanism of “Granit”. Thus, the missile will reach its target and, if not neutralize by the air defense systems (which is not very probable), destroy the target. Russian Antey missile. Enormous bang for the ruble. Furthermore, as the American “expert” should know, no one will fire at an aircraft carrier group just one missile! Every one of our “Antey”-carrying submarines is equipped with 24 such missiles. Additionally, I believe, if the Chief of Staff of our Navy plans an operation to destroy an American aircraft carrier, such operation will involve more than one “Antey”. If all 24 “Granit” missiles are fired simultaneously, it will be all but impossible to intercept them. Most of them fly at a very low altitude: they creep just above the surface of the ocean. Just one missile flies above – it guides the whole pack to the target. If the adversary destroys the guiding missile, it is immediately substituted by one of the remaining missiles flying below. When the Soviet engineers designed these missiles, they incorporated elements of artificial intelligence in their design: the missiles communicate with each other selecting their targets in such a way, so that two missiles accidentally do not hit the same small target. For example, our missiles know how to select the main target, and if that target is an aircraft carrier, the “Granits” would not self-target the accompanying warships – they will target specifically the carrier. In addition, the missiles know other little tricks that certainly will come as a “pleasant” surprise for the Americans, such as the ability to interact with the Naval Space System of Intelligence and Guidance (NSIG). It seems, however, that the author of this American article has no idea that NSIG exists. However, such a system existed back in the Soviet Union – named “Legend”. Its Russian descendant is “Liana”, that has broad capabilities to detect and follow American aircraft carrier groups in the ocean. This system is capable of guiding missiles to targets even after their have been launched. Obviously, no matter how good the weapons are or how sophisticated the detection system is – there is no 100% guarantee that an aircraft carrier will be destroyed by the first missile launch. However, the probability that by using all means at our disposal we will sink it is pretty high. Armed To The Teeth And Very Careful [dropcap]L[/dropcap]et us find out who provides serious American journals with such analytical trash. Who is this fantastic American “expert” that has no problem misleading his readers? He is Loren Thompson, Chief Operating Officer of the Lexington Institute, a well-known organization, by the way. He is also a Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University where he taught strategy to graduate students and lectured at the Harvard University’s School of Government. We can only guess what kind of strategy this expert in strategic thinking taught his students. I think we can appreciate the quality of the government officials trained on the lectures of this illustrious “expert”. But let us return to the reasons why we, supposedly, will never be able to sink an American aircraft carrier. The second and third reasons, according to Thompson, is that an American aircraft carrier “has lots of weapons and can defend itself . . .” Who could have thought? Really, one immediately senses that he is dealing with a true professional looking into the heart of the matter An aircraft carrier is indeed loaded with weapons. Thompson, however, does not seem to understand that these are offensive and not defensive weapons. A carrier is completely incapable of defending itself! The air defense and defense against submarines are expected to be provided by the accompanying ships. Loren Thompson says that these ships are numerous and well armed, and that is why a carrier will never be sunk. I am almost afraid to remind him that an attack on the carrier will not be conducted singlehandedly, either! In Soviet times, a whole regiment of missile-armed Ty-22 aircrafts was designated for the destruction of one American aircraft carrier. This means a few dozens airplanes. Plus submarines armed with cruise missiles. Plus other means of attack and destruction at our Navy’s disposal. As history teaches us: 70 years ago during World War II the presence of a large number of accompanying ships did not prevent the Japanese from sinking many an American aircraft carrier. In two years from 1942 to 1944 they successfully sunk as many as 11 of them! We should think that offensive weapons advanced significantly since those times. For example, the fighter-interceptor Tu-22 M3 (long distance supersonic missile-armed bomber – editor note). These Soviet-time airplanes are being thoroughly modernized, and the equipment of these newly modernized machines Tu-22 M3M will include, in particular, anti-ship new generation missiles X-32. For some reason, they are rarely mentioned in the press, but these are fantastic missiles. After launch, they come up to 40 km and fly at a speed almost 5 times faster than the sound. After coming upon the target, they descend on it almost vertically. Today, the United States Navy does not possess any weapon even remotely close in its characteristics to our X-32. The Americans also do not have any air defense system capable of intercepting this missile . . . That is why the fourth reason that, as The National Interest asserts, makes the enemy incapable of destroying American aircraft carriers is particularly important. What is this reason? Oh yes – they “do not take chances”. When, perhaps, it would be better not to leave the base and go into the open ocean at all? It is so much safer . . . But if you are out there . . . Take chances or not, but on the way to the area of conflict with our Navy (in the North Atlantic, for example) the American aircraft carries would have to pass through straits, narrow channels, where, naturally, our submarines and other forces would be waiting for them and, according to the Russian custom, welcome them with the “bread-and-salt” of cruise missiles seasoned with torpedoes, mines, and bombs . . . In any case, the traditional Russian welcome for the aircraft carriers will be assured! Whether you are careful or not, you cannot arrive from Jacksonville, an American Navy base on the US East coast, to our shores (for example, to the area of responsibility of the Northern Navy with its main bases on the Kolsky peninsula) bypassing several well-known narrow channels and straits. The Americans themselves during the Cold War constructed anti-submarine barriers in those places with the goal of preventing our subs from getting into the Atlantic. The best-known examples – the barrier along the line the North Cape – Medvezhyi (Bear) island and between Iceland and Faroe islands . . . The last, fifth, reason of the invincibility of the American aircraft carriers, according to Loren Thompson, is the greatest achievement of his expert-analytical approach. The reason is a fact self-evident for every American that the Americans are generally the best in the world and they possess the best technologies, including the military ones. However, this is not exactly a fact. For example, the Russian technologies of anti-ship cruise missiles are definitely better than their American counterparts. Everyone who knows anything and learned anything about the subject knows that. In particular, military experts are paying close attention to the Russian hypersonic missiles of the new generation. Farsighted Alarmists The hypersonic Zircon: so far unbeatable. An epochal game changer. [dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Americans do not appear to be amenable to reason but some of their allies are more or less adequate. Thus, recently the media in Great Britain created a veritable hysteria on the subject of the new Russian missile “Zircon”. The first to raise alarm was the British newspaper The Independent. It stated: “It is impossible to stop “Zircon”. Even the newest air defense systems are yet to come to the British Navy will only be able to destroy target at the maximum speed of 3700 km/hour, whereas “Zircon” can reach 6000 or even 7400 km/hour”. The Daily Star offered further development of the theme about the scary Russians: Another British newspaper, The Mirror, carried on in the same alarmist tone. It wrote: “The Russian missile moves with the speed twice as fast as the speed of the sniper bullet. It can send the most advanced ships to the bottom of the sea. The experts say that out Navy today has no defense against this terrible weapon. The appearance of “Zircon” in the Russian arsenal make both our aircraft carriers costing $7 billion each useless”. The Daily Mail added the final accord to this panicky choir: “Russia created an invincible cruise missile that travels at 4600 miles per hour and is capable of destroying a British aircraft carries with one hit. This deadly missile “Zircon” can be launched from the land, sea, or air carriers. It covers 155 miles in 2.5 minutes. Its appearance make the very idea of the aircraft carrier groups meaningless, and we simply do not have anything to counter it with”. The Americans might, of course, hope that our “Zircon” is a threat exclusively to the British aircraft carriers. Regardless of what they think, the facts say differently: any attempt by the American Navy to test in the real battle conditions whether or not the Russians can sink their aircraft carrier will most likely end quite badly for the US of A. Parting shot—a word from the editors window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";“Unsinkable” American Aircraft Carriers: Five Nonsensical Statements
The second one – “it has many weapons . . . “
The third reason – “it is well defended . . .”.
The fourth reason – “it acts prudently . . . “
And, finally, the fifth – “the American military technologies are the best in the world . . .”.
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et us take a closer look at the way the author of the article – an expert and political analyst – explains to his readers why the American aircraft carriers are invulnerable and unsinkable . . .
“Russia produces deadly missiles capable of destroying the entire Royal Navy in one hit. A representative of the British Foreign Ministry believes that the Russian “Zircon”, which can carry a nuclear warhead, completely changes the rules of war at sea. Our aircraft carriers simply could not be deployed where the Russians have these missiles...”
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The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
How Progressives Can Compete for Major Office: A Class Analysis of Political Paralysis
Learning from the Green Party Defeat in New Jersey.
third party and independent representation is up 40% since 2014. This bodes well for the long game.
But, how alternative party can win major office remains an open question.
In 2017, Wall Street’s strongest candidate, Phil Murphy, won the New Jersey Governors race with under 20% of the eligible vote. But it was “none of the above” that had the big numbers with at least 65% of the eligible voters staying home, making it the lowest turnout in history. The people of New Jersey have rejected the major parties without choosing an alternative. The Green party was unable to win significant votes, totaling a tiny .5% of the vote cast by a brave and desperate 10,000.
The Class Analysis of Political Paralysis
Beneath the liberal pretensions and snobbery that shape the narratives of New York City media, New Jersey and New York City have become increasingly conservative. Or more precisely, the remaining voters have become more conservative as a growing number abandon elections altogether.
Christie: a mean-spirited thug with an attitude to match.
In both substance and style Chris Christie foreshadowed Trump and he was elected twice. The second time was a landslide with the support of many Democratic voters and officials. New Jersey also voted for Clinton when they had the choice of Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, as did NYC. Murphy’s victory depended on voters that were willing to overlook the central role of Goldman Sachs in creating the brutal inequality that helped to give us Trump.
Nine New Jersey counties voted for Trump as did Staten Island, Orange, Putnam and Suffolk County — the most Jersey-like suburban counties in the New York metro area. Trump is New York City born and bred — a plain fact that the corporate media has all but ignored. Imagine the scorn that would have been heaped on Iowa, Alabama, or West Virginia had Trump hailed from the deplorable hinterlands.
Is it fundamentally conservative to accept that fact that Phil Murphy can buy his way into the governor’s mansion? I can hear the appeals to so-called realism now and anyway “that is just the way it is.” Well, that’s the way it was when Jon Corzine purchased the same post in 2005 before losing to Christie in 2009. The Republican’s open class-war program and New Jersey’s own financial crisis will give Murphy an excuse to betray his promises and — Corzine redux — pave the way for an eventual Republican return to power.
It’s a high bar and I wish it were easier but nothing short of a serious long-term organizing approach will prevail against the most deeply entrenched political machines in the world.
While there are lots of good people within every demographic, New Jersey has two large related social groups that act as a support network for the two-party system. The urban professional and managerial classes are the core constituency of corporate Democratsand the affluent white suburbanites are the Republican’s base. Beneath the appearance of extraordinary differences between them, they have a lot in common starting with a belief that the established order is the only possible world.
Both believe, in there own way, that the economy is based on merit. Both believe they have earned their social place and their political opinions through hard work or higher education. The liberals just toss in a dash of corporate identity politics to rally their troops and the conservatives stir their side by scapegoating immigrants and calling on white identity. Both are galvanized by the fear of foreigners — be it Russians or Mexicans — and fall into line by blaming others for problems of our own making.
Many in both these buffer groups have careers with the major industries of the region: insurance companies and Big Pharma that oppose universal health care; Wall Street firms that produce extreme inequality; media conglomerates that control the newspapers and TV; and the large corporatized universities that serve business interests while impoverishing students, workers and contingent faculty. These corporations exert enormous economic, political and cultural power, pushing New Jersey and NYC to the right. Voting records too often reflect that conservatism.
Many unions, environmental groups, student organizations, even some civil rights groups remain faithful to the well-worn but worn-out tactic of “access” to the powerful rather than challenging the powerful. They continue on the same path as if the same 50-year period of relying on access has not also been one of across-the-board decline in the fortunes of the multi-racial working class, students, women and the environment.
In 2016, a record 43% of union members showed their desperation and acceptance of scapegoating and white supremacy by voting for Trump. In 2017, instead of embracing more aggressive campaigns to better educate workers or organize the unorganized, New Jersey’s union officials took the shortcut, circled the wagons and went for Wall Street. Now we will see what they can make of their victory.
Will the two-party system retain the allegiance of urban professionals, managers and affluent suburbanites as the multiple crisis of environmental destruction, war, inequality and corporate control continue to deepen? Its hard to say. Many individuals from both groups already do the right thing. If their complicity with and support for the corporate order can be weakened, even a little, it could mean a lot. The best way to force their hand however is by exerting pressure and leadership from below.
The Green Party is a Poor People’s Party
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he primary problem with the 2017 Green party campaign for governor of New Jersey was the lack of resources. All other problems were secondary.
The Green Party could not have hoped for better candidates and staff. Given the progressive, visionary, and hardworking leadership of Seth Kaper-Dale, Lisa Durden and campaign manager Geoff Herzog, I think it is safe to say that great candidates are a necessary but not sufficient part of a run at major office
The Green Party has the values, principle and platform to win. The Sanders campaign proved that. Sanders offered a less complete version of the Green Party values to a public more than ready to hear it despite media censorship and a rigged election.
The Greens have it all except a convincing path to power and the resources to make it real.
Too few volunteers and too little money limited the Green Party’s ability to really test the strategy of reaching out to the young and the largely black and brown working-class communities. The focus on the most exploited and oppressed was not simply the result of a grand analysis but was the product of face-to-face interactions with people from the outset. People of color and younger voters from all backgrounds were the most likely to take our fliers, talk with us a bit, look us in the eye and thank us for our efforts.
And, we should not forget that Kaper-Dale/Durden did get the endorsement of two local Our Revolution chapters and two civil rights organizations. An unknown but surely substantial number of our 10,000 votes were from immigrant and anti-racist activists, Berners and social-democrats and young people hoping for a better life. The Jabari Brisport campaign in NYC also suggests a coalition with DSA and Our Revolution is well worth exploring.
The Green strategy was twofold: outreach to the unrepresented and discouraged working class and to other progressives.
The team was approximately 100 people with about a third who made major commitments of time, energy and money. A real run at power would have required a minimum of ten times that much: 1,000 volunteers with 300 ready to devote serious resources to the campaign.
This begs the question: How can progressive campaigns dramatically increase their resources?
It’s Deep Organizing or Deep Trouble
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne possible answer is to conduct electoral campaigns much more like social movements. If the Green Party is going to have successful runs at major office it will be to the degree that it becomes the electoral wing of the social movements. Can we organize the unorganized?
First, we must bring a culture of organizing into electoral politics and then fuse the Green Party with the kind of social movement organizing that continues outside of elections.
For electoral organizing, progressives might start two years out from the election with a series of listening sessions hosted by local leaders from various communities — urban, rural, small town and suburban. Based upon these listening sessions party activists could go on to help people form organizations suited to their needs or support existing ones. These might be community groups to advocate for their neighborhoods at city hall or service organizations to fill urgent community needs. Electoral reform groups, tenants unions, environmental groups, civil rights groups, Green Party chapters — a victorious campaign might be built on any number of organizations. But, there must be “structure” or what Martin Luther King called “units of power.” It’s about building power, not just speaking truth to power. Each community should develop leadership, strategy and units of power based on their own needs.
Given the dismal turnout it would also be wise to aim for an intermediate goal. While we failed to get 5% for Jill Stein, having a strategic goal helped people understand why their participation mattered. Progressives could launch our own “Fight for 15%” as a way of giving people a handle on the value of sending a powerful message still short of total victory. A 15% turnout in a major election would deliver real power forcing the two parties to move toward the people or face the consequences.
This takes time, a lot of time. The lesson of the Green Party New Jersey Gubernatorial race is that a two year campaign would be absolute minimum and only if it is also based on a foundation of ongoing community organizing. It’s a high bar and I wish it were easier but nothing short of a serious long-term organizing approach will prevail against the most deeply entrenched political machines in the world.
Only millions of people can make history. For progressives that means mobilizing the latent power of the occasion and discouraged voters of every class and color. Most people in the US no longer have faith in the system but no convincing alternative has yet to emerge. And that alternative can only be created with the energy and power of millions dedicated to challenging power and disrupting existing forms of social control. Getting the people back into politics and the money out will take deep organizing and persistence in the face of defeat.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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Sticks and Stones: Free Speech and Punching Politics
Speaking brave truths to activists 
Many Americans, and not only those on the left, were rightfully outraged in August by the sight of hundreds of torch-bearing “white nationalists”—i.e., white supremacists, explicit racists and fascists, the KKK, and Stormfront—marching through the streets of Charlottesville to protest the removal of a monument to a warrior “hero” of the slave system of the Confederacy. And hundreds of counter-demonstrators, from various political and religious tendencies, were on the scene to make that outrage known.
The melee that resulted, which ended in the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, brought to a boil the debate about free speech and aggressive physical violence that has been percolating among various corners of what’s called “the left” in this country since the sucker punch of Richard Spencer during his on-the-street TV interview in January.
The question is: In our country today, is it acceptable, even necessary, to deny right-wing, characterizable-as-“fascist,” political opponents the right to express their views in public, with whatever means necessary, whether that be legal censorship or preemptive physical force?
There is now a significant cohort of people—40% of millennials, according to Pew Research—who answer that question “Yes.”
Of course, some of those answering “Yes” would qualify that they only endorse legal and non-violent means of restricting objectionable political “hate speech.” But, especially since Charlottesville, the “antifa” groups who brook no such niceties are in the vanguard of this movement, setting the tone and agenda, and challenging the weaker-minded to accept the street-fighting antifa position as the unavoidable logical consequence of that “Yes.” Antifa activists not only do not shy from starting fights, they pride themselves on their willingness to do so, and argue that it’s only that willingness that will effectively resist the rising tide of fascism and move other left-of-liberals in their direction.
That “Yes” answer is made even more significant by being given op-ed space in prominent liberal establishment media.[1] “Liberal” is a remarkable word here, since for many decades it’s been conservatives and the right who have rejected and vilified organizations like the ACLU that defend the rights of minorities and dissidents to express unpopular opinions. It’s now the establishment conservative and to-the-right-of-conservative media that poses as the champion of free speech.
My answer to that question is: “No.” I do not agree that right-wing political opponents, even those characterizable as “fascist,” should be denied the right to express their views, either by force of law or by physical aggression from groups identified as antifa leftists. I think such a position in the United States today is pernicious in principle and politically dangerous.
In this post, I am going to focus on the physical aggression part of this position. I’ll talk about the more general issue of “free speech” in another post.
First of all, some “nots.”
Left groups and demonstrators have the absolute right to, and I think should, defend themselves and resist any attacks with whatever force they consider necessary and politically appropriate. I am notcriticizing defensive force.
There is no “antifa” organization or leadership, so I am not, and cannot be, characterizing or dismissing all actions taken by every group self-identified or identified by the media as such.
In that regard, I find some actions of such groups in Charlottesville, like the defense of non-violent protestors as experienced by Cornel West and reported by Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick, to be admirable. Other actions, like the chasing and beating of unarmed protestors just for being there (”Get the fuck out!”), and, as Leighton Woodhouse observed, “command[ing] photographers not to take their pictures, .. physically block[ing] them from doing so, and if they persisted,… smash[ing] their equipment and assault[ing] them.” I reject as bullying, dangerous, and politically damaging. [2]
So, I’m not using the word “antifa” to refer to any particular group or any particular tactic, but to those who insist on the strategic principleof stopping political expression by those whom they identify as “fascist,” by force of law or by physical aggression.
I also do not want to characterize antifa activists as the ethico-political, “mirror-image” equivalent of fascists. No, “both sides” are not equally “evil” (a word that should be excised from the vocabulary of secular leftism). What you are fighting for is more important than the tactics you choose, and those who fight for equality are not as bad as those who advocate racism, no matter what tactics they may share.
As can any well-meaning activists, however, they can be stupider, and, in specific contexts, more dangerous to the political goals of the egalitarian and socialist left than some right-wing actors. Their tactics and strategy can work to impede the urgent and crucial task for the American left—that of building mass political support.
I think that Antifa activists are fighting a battle against an enemy deserving of contempt, but undeserving of the attention and intense energy being directed against it, energy on which that enemy only feeds. In the process, they are ignoring other, more crucial battles against powerful and dangerous enemies, and throwing away a crucial tool (free speech) needed to fight all those enemies. For me, antifa action falls into the category defined by one of history’s shrewdest quips: “It’s worse than a crime; it’s an error.”
Nor does my position derive from an absolute insistence on “non-violence.” In fact, I dislike the casual “imaginary pacifism” that crops up repeatedly as a constituent of American liberal and leftish ideology, and I have made this point emphatically in a number of essays on CounterPunch and on my web site, in the course of making a left argument for gun rights. The radical social and political changes we need to make in this country will require combat of many kinds against entrenched powers who never have and never will concede to moral suasion alone. I maintain the perspective that a socialist movement doesn’t just seek to express itself, but to win the battle for democratic power, and that, whether it ever comes to it or not, a serious revolutionary movement must be prepared to use force to win that battle.
So, it’s not the antifa willingness to fight, or even to start a fight when necessary, that’s a problem. Who starts the fight, and who uses which weapons, is not as important as what they’re fighting for, and whether their fighting strategy is more likely to help win or lose the decisive battle.
In many ways, traditional non-violent protest tactics—even mass demonstrations—are showing their limits. At this point, everybody in America has seen this play a thousand times, and probably been in it a few. All the characters know their marks, their lines, and their cues. The regime is completely familiar with it, and for the most part controls the production from curtain to curtain. I certainly have no more interest in going to demonstrations where I’m literally penned in for hours. There’s nothing in that which threatens the political, let alone the socio-economic, regime in any serious way.
So, yes, we need a new, much more challenging, script, and groups like Black Bloc, Redneck Revolt, and antifa are making us all think about it.
But we are just beginning to think about that, and, even though militant non-violent resistance cannot by itself revolutionize entrenched state-supported political and socio-economic structures, it is still a powerful political tactic—very effective for building popular support against unjust and oppressive ideologies and practices, by state and non-state actors. That’s because, despite any demurrals of cross-bearing clergy or stick-wielding antifa, it is a use of political and physical force, and should be respected as such. In some form, it is still the most effective mode of protest available for leftists, no matter how radical their goals, in the United States today.
The crucial element in all of the above is building popular support, the most potent and important weapon for revolutionary struggle; and the most important target for that struggle is the capitalist state, with its policies and structures, which comprises the most powerful and pernicious agent of injustice and destruction. In terms of that task, I think the left in America—by which I mean committed socialist (or at least anti-capitalist) leftists who are well over Democratic Party capitalist and imperialist “liberalism”—has to take as its starting point Adolph Reed Jr.’s injunction:
The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one. ….There are no magical interventions, shortcuts, or technical fixes. We need to reject the fantasy that some spark will ignite the People to move as a mass. We must create a constituency for a left program — and that cannot occur via MSNBC or blog posts or the New York Times. It requires painstaking organization and building relationships with people outside the Beltway and comfortable leftist groves.
It cannot occur via antifa tactics, either. Sucker-punching tactics are not the new spark that will ignite the people’s revolutionary fervor. It’s foolish to think that the failure of previous non-violent protests to change state structures can be blamed on the failure of the tactics, rather than the failure of the underlying politics in other domains. Those mass movements either did not achieve popular support, or, more poignantly, they did, but that support was coopted and channeled into an electoral theater and a political leadership that undermined and effectively annulled their goals, and turned energetic popular opposition back into apathy and acceptance. The transition from millions of antiwar protestors on the streets against the Vietnam and Iraq wars to <crickets> in the face of Obama’s Libya-Syria-Yemen-drones-around-the-world wars, illustrates that sad political dynamic.
Anitfa tactics do nothing to overcome that. In fact, antifa is usually fighting for principles that have widespread, biparitsan national acceptance, and in venues where they are supported not only by the population, but by government authority and political elites.
For all the left’s weakness in terms of changing national structures of social oppression, it has—in specific, delimited domains where left-liberalism dominates politically and culturally (elite college campuses, “Blue” cities and regions, influential liberal media, etc.)—won significant cultural and ideological battles that translate into the hegemony of egalitarian discourses and practices, and the shaming of others.
It’s disingenuous to deny this. Just as it’s disingenuous for the right to pretend that, in most other domains of economic and political importance—“Red” cities and statehouses, powerful right-wing media, the military and police, corporations and public economic institutions, etc.—they don’t have effective ideological as well as political hegemony.
In either of these domains, expressions of minority opinions or behaviors can result in ideological shaming and attempts at administrative and/or legal sanction. “Political Correctness” works both ways, and it’s extremely disingenuous for the right to pretend that “PC” is most powerfully and extensively, let alone uniquely, practiced by the left. What are the rules for the national anthem? Flag pins? “God Bless the United States of America”?
As those questions indicate, it’s also disingenuous for liberals and conservative to pretend that there are not many ideological mandates that they conjointly enforce, and that that bipartisan agreement covers all the fundamental structures of American capitalism and imperialism—as in, you know: “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”
Well, one of the cultural and ideological tropes that has become an accepted part of the bipartisan ideological consensus is racial, ethnic, and sexual equality.
The militant non-violent actions of the civil-rights movements of the sixties, as well as the threats posed by its more radical armed wings, did build popular as well as elite support of the principle of African-American equality. There were real victories on the plane of legal and political equality, which included the dismantling of the explicit Jim Crow system, and the nurturing of an African-American elite in the political, cultural, and ideological life of the country—the laudable but limited goal to which the civil-rights movement was relentlessly steered.
That movement for equality was extended to the present day, winning similar laudable victories of political, cultural, and ideological inclusion for other previously marginalized groups and “identities,” culminating most recently in the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage.
From Brown v. Board of Education to Obergefell v. Hodges, and from The Cosby Show to Will and Grace—the latter two cultural texts being as least as important as the former—American attitudes changed significantly. As superficial as it may be, in public discourse, it’s become de rigueur to profess belief in racial and gender equality, and to fear being shamed if you don’t. It’s disingenuous to deny this:
By any reasonable measure, American attitudes have become steadily more liberal over time. A summary of opinion polling since the 1970s shows a “sweeping, fundamental change in norms regarding race”, with steady declines on practically every key measure of racism. Surveys on attitudes towards women reveal an identical decline in sexism. More belatedly, a similar transformation happened in attitudes towards LGBT people. Two-thirds of Americans now support gay marriage, up from just 40 percent in 2009.
These transformed attitudes were absorbed into an establishment-endorsed project of representational equality that integrated identity elites into the “normal” cultural and political life of the country, and propelled them into the ranks of police chiefs, mayors, governors, and even the presidency. Alvaro Reyes points out:
the Obama presidency was undoubtedly the product of a long civil rights era that had sought to break down the rather explicit forms of white supremacy …. In this respect, the civil rights movement was incredibly successful—consider the fact that in the mid-1960s there were some 600 elected Black officials in the United States and that by the time of Obama’s presidential campaign there were over 10,000!
Of course, none of that—not even the presidency—improved the deteriorating quality of life for the majority of people of all these identity groups, because none of it touched the fundamental structure of the inequality-producing, capitalist social economy. As Glenn Greenwald said of same-sex marriage, these changes were effected in ways that do not “threaten entrenched ruling interests …undermine oligarchs, the National Security State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political power.”
Certainly, none of that mitigated the damage being done to the multi-racial working class—and disproportionally to Black and Latino workers—to which the majority of all these groups belong.
Indeed, as Zach Heller points out, our first African-American president: “orchestrated … the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world: $4.5 trillion dollars was gifted to Wall Street banks, widening the gap between rich and poor more than under any president before.”
And, as Reyes makes clear, the worst effects of all that fell on people of color:
the public image of “racial progress” touted by the Democratic Party generally and Black and Latino politicians in particular runs up against a brutally grim reality. …[T]he racial wealth gap today is far worse than it was 30 years ago: …Black and Latino communities lost between 30% and 40% of their wealth in the late 2000s; …median Black household wealth is less than 7% that of white household wealth; and …if you are a single woman of color your median total wealth is a grand total of five dollars!
Five dollars?! Hey, that may be five too many. According to the Institute for Policy Studies: “if the racial wealth divide is left unaddressed, median Black household wealth is on a path to hit zero by 2053 and median Latino household wealth is projected to hit zero twenty years later.”
So, the advances of neo-liberal identity-politics developed concomitantly with neo-liberal socio-economic assaults on the multiracial working class, which inevitably had worse effects on Black and Latino workers. Per Reyes, it transformed “larger and larger portions of these communities… into ‘surplus populations’ with little or no relation to the increasingly financialized global economy, and contained by swelling police forces and disproportionally warehoused in the prison system.”
Thus, the neo-liberal representational victories do not at all disprove Adolph Reed’s point above. Through the relentless political and ideological work of the ruling class, these victories were won, not as victories of the “left,” but of “the left-wing of neoliberalism.” They are not the opposite, but the obverse, of the complete absence of any truly radical left as a “politically effective force.”
All of this, as Reyes remarks, was abetted by the “strange marriage between Black and Latino politicians and the neoliberal agenda dominant within the Democratic Party,” and there was no “left” in or out of that ménage that was capable of offering any effective resistance.
In situations like Charlottesville, we have to recognize that it’s municipal governments, into which those identity elites have been integrated, and which in no way threaten ruling-class interests, that have and are using the power to do things like removing Confederate statues, even in “red” ex-Confederate states.
In this regard, antifa is operating in domains where what the right calls the “left” (neo-liberal identity-politics) is operating from a position of relative strength and established power. Thus, with gleeful schadenfreude the alt-right mocks the identity-politics left as the establishment (which it is part of), and presents itself as the edgy, rebellious insurgency—as in the specious but discomfiting video rantwhere Paul Joseph Watson insists, presenting Johnny Rotten in support, that “conservatism is the new counterculture and populism is the new punk.” (Watson, like many leftists today, seems to presume populism must be right-wing.)
The socialist left may have no political victories that have reversed the onslaught of material harm being done to the multiracial working class, but the neo-liberal identity-politics “left” won the American culture wars, not the racist right. That’s precisely what infuriates the alt-right (defined as a frankly racist and/or incipiently fascist movement) and what it is trying to change.
The new “alt-right” is operating from a position of weakness, and is furiously trying to gin up a counterattack—a kind of culture war Battle of the Bulge—by white people in an effort to revive retrograde social attitudes that have been thoroughly discredited.
It’s disingenuous to deny this. As Lee Jones put it: “When everyone from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders agrees with you, you are kicking at an open door.” Jones also reminds us of the historical trajectory:
The membership of vile organisations like the Ku Klux Klan has collapsed, from a peak of three to six million in the 1920s to around 6,000 today. Only 10 percent of the US public admit to supporting the “alt right” (only 4 percent “strongly”), while 83 percent say it is “unacceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views”. Too high and not high enough, one might say. But the fact is that the far-right is a lunatic fringe.
And Reyes:
I think it is a mistake to believe that there has been some sudden and sweeping upsurge of neo-Nazi organizing since Trump’s election, which is how this situation has often been portrayed in the media… despite the fact that we have to take [the] growth [of extreme right-wing groups] seriously, we must also recognize that in a country of 323 million people, any movement that can only muster 500 adherents for a national convergence is a movement with an extremely limited operational capacity. If we don’t pay attention to this fact, then the overwhelming media coverage these events have received may very well make us think that there is already a neo-Nazi around every corner, creating a sense of panic and paralysis that, at this point, is out of proportion to the dimensions of this particular problem…
[B]y overstating the threat of organized neo-Nazi violence we risk missing how the more mundane operations of a structural white supremacy have, since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, proliferated within the mainstream political parties.
Antifa may insist, in a way that amplifies the agita of the #Resistance, that there’s a new variable in town, which does create an imminent fascist threat to the presumably non-fascist status quo: Donald Trump. He has emboldened white nationalism in his campaign, and threatens to enact various racist and retrograde policies. He will enable a resurgence of the explicitly racist and fascist right. So everybody who supports Trump or wears a MAGA hat is a target for assault.
By all means, let’s confront Trump’s horrible policies, and all newly-energized expressions of racism and fascism, with mass, militant demonstrations of our own, as was done in Boston. Outnumbering the right 10-to-1 is a clear political victory. Let’s also recognize that Donald Trump has a small and shrinking core of support, that most people who voted for him are less-than-fascist, that he is increasingly despised, caged, and threatened by the ruling elites of both parties, and that the more he talks, the worse it gets for him and his most intransigent supporters.
Donald Trump’s electoral victory doesn’t signify resurgent fascism of ordinary Americans; it signifies their abysmal political confusion and their increasing and justified distrust of elite-managed politics, conservative and liberal. Trump is only the most obvious pimple, along with the raging acne of reactionary governors, state legislators, and potential post-impeachment presidents, that has erupted from the infectious brew of contemptuous elite disregard for masses of “flyover” deplorables and the relentless “Foxification” ideological campaign of right-wing media, brought to a head with a corrupt electoral system. Did Donald Trump create that problem? Is antifa helping to solve it?
People marching around with torches and swastikas, chanting “Blood and Soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” will not get any significant support among the populace (or the ruling media and political elite, for that matter). People who get beaten while lying on the ground will. The only thing that could improve white nationalists’ standing among the populace is to make them perceivable as victims of bullies.
That’s why liberal media were initially favorable to antifa groups in Charlottesville—because the killing of Heather Heyer made the right the aggressors. But if antifa pursues its strategy, there is going to be a Charlottesville that goes the other way, with somebody on the “other” side getting seriously hurt, paralyzed, or killed.
And, if consistent, antifa doesn’t care. If you’re engaging in a process of seeking fights anywhere and everywhere, you must accept the near-inevitability that something like that is going to happen to a right-wing protestor (or to a bystander, or to someone trying to stop the fighting), and have concluded in advance both that such an outcome is ethically justified and that the likely political blowback is worth it. (Unless you just haven’t thought about it at all.)
If you start a fight, you can’t in good faith be surprised about your casualties, or pretend you didn’t mean or aren’t responsible for your opponents’. You can’t feign surprise at the damage, both to persons and to the political calculus of sympathy that the fight you started caused.
In any situation, offensive tactics have to be based on a rigorous calculation of the balance of political and material/military forces, on preparation and training, on carefully choosing your battles (fighting only those you can win or must fight), and on the indispensable advice of a most astute analysts on such matters, Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a game plan until they get smacked in the face.”
Excuse me if I don’t think antifa is there yet.
It didn’t take more than a week for the media and the elite’s sympathy for the street-fighting “left” in Charlottesville to become denunciations of “left-wing domestic terrorism.” They’re preparing pre-emptively for their assault on any future left-wing militancy.
Let’s not misjudge the strategic political situation. If we had a threatening left movement that had already built mass popular support, in a situation of revolutionary crisis, and we had to launch an offensive attack on the capitalist state and fascist attack dogs it was using to crush us, that would be another story. But we’re not; we’re in a situation where left and right groups are maneuvering to dislodge masses of people from identification with and submission to the “radical center,” which maintains a strong ideological and political grip on the working class (i.e., everybody who doesn’t have a decent life from capital income, who has to sell his/her labor-power to a capitalist every week to live at all).
It’s certainly true that the smile has been wiped off the American state, The whole felicitous post-WWII construct of the liberal, democratic, capitalist but class-neutral, welfare state has reverted to its core class function, in ways that have become too visible to ignore. It has become all-too obvious that, as Etienne Balibar put it over thirty years ago, the modern capitalist state, ours included, is “expressly organized as the State of pre-emptive counter-revolution.”
But in the U.S., it’s the “radical center” that—politically, via the party duopoly and, ideologically, via the mainstream media—controls that state, and seeks pre-emptively to crush or coopt any nascent political movements on the radical left or right that might arise in response to the deteriorating social conditions and increased awareness.
That “center”—which includes the “strange marriage between Black and Latino politicians and the neoliberal agenda dominant within the Democratic Party”—does not yet need or want the help of the radical right, and would prefer to do without its destabilizing effects. That’s not how the American ruling class rules.
Nobody’s going to impose a white nationalist program in the United States—not only because extant social attitudes of the populace as well as demographic realities (and the militant resistance to any such program they imply) make it impossible, but also because the American ruling class will not permit it, or the civil war that any attempt at it would entail. It’s silly to think that either is on the horizon, but it’s important to recognize that the ruling elite wants neither a fascist nor a communist takeover of the United States. It wants precisely to pose as the neutral, rational buffer between the two. That’s how it rules.
Which is exactly what antifa tactics are helping it do. Antifa street-fighting will not lead to fascists being defeated by an anarchist-socialist-communist movement, but it will inevitably provoke the intervention of the capitalist state—an eventuality for which antifa does nothing to prepare. Antifa is creating a situation that gives the liberal-conservative ruling elite a new rationale to define itself as the keeper of the peace, and radical left dissent as “domestic terrorism.” Thus, any populist movement is again defeated in advance—in advance of building the popular support needed for effective revolutionary action. And the state of pre-emptive counter-revolution is further reinforced.
Because antifa misjudges the strategic situation, it misjudges the tactical situation in the theater of political demonstration.
In any demonstration of the radical right or left there are a small number of committed members of organizing groups, and many more sympathetic or curious people, semi-involved or hanging out on the sidelines. The task for any serious political movement in such events is not just to express their outrage, but to reach out to those semi-involved and lingering on the edge, and to a larger public, in ways that encourage their deeper participation. A radical movement that is trying to build mass popular support has to make itself a pole of attraction, to appear as a source of information, analysis, and supportthat people might listen to, and a vehicle for actions they might want to build as well as join. That’s what the alt-right has been trying to do. Fortunately for everyone, the more it’s heard and seen, its “Blood and Soil” racism will fail it.
So, refraining from attacking non-violent political expression is not about being polite to committed members of radical fascist groups. It’s about recognizing that there are many more people on the scene (which includes the media scene), who may have heard something from Trump or some other character that sounded alright (“Let’s not go to war with Russia. Let’s take care of American workers instead.”), but aren’t committed to anything at all, and want to know more. Because that’s the way most Americans—whose main source of political education is the soft- to hard-right ideological apparatus bounded by MSNBC and Fox, the New York Times and Breitbart—make up their minds. It’s about recognizing that the left has to reach a lot of those people on the periphery who, inevitably, have a lot of half-assed ideas in their heads that they haven’t thought through, and it’s about the left being confident that its message of peace, social justice, and class solidarity will succeed, if it can be effectively delivered.
Using these events as targeting exercises, where flying squads of the most righteously militant seek out and bash anyone wearing a MAGA hat is guaranteed to repulse almost everyone who is not sufficiently woke to have scoped out and rejected all forms of retrograde thought in advance. Ganging up on fellow citizens walks, talks, and quacks like bullying.
Is attacking demonstrators, and people who are just hanging around and “don’t have to be a Nazi!” to be pummeled, an effective tactic for building new alliances and deepening class solidarity, or is it an exercise in demonstrating the righteousness and bravado of a small cohort of the like-minded, in a way that’s guaranteed to put off a lot of potential allies? Take a look at this five-second clip from Shane Bauer:
Antifa beat down apparent alt-righter. pic.twitter.com/WVdDJqLKmA
— Shane Bauer (@shane_bauer) August 27, 2017
Who’s doing a better job of attracting support for a working-class, socialist movement: the woman in the red shirt or the people beating the guy on the ground? How effective is the beatdown-the-Nazis tactic for bringing potential allies into a politically-effective movement? Ask this guy, who travelled to Boston to protest the white nationalists, and got sucker-punched because he was profiled by some antifa as a Nazi:
"He is on our side!"
This anti-white nationalist protester was punched in the face after being mistaken for a neo-Nazi in Boston: pic.twitter.com/Hi3U02vjBc
— Splinter (@splinter_news) August 22, 2017
“I’m not exactly sure what I’m here for now” is not where effective movement-building tactics would have put this guy.
In both of these cases, I’m with the women who oppose the antifa tactics. And they do oppose them, as antifa proponents must recognize. In the first video, the woman physically blocks the antifa Nazi-beaters, and helps the guy being beaten. Can antifa accept that? Is she herself a Trump supporter? (Yes, Virginia, there are African-American and other non-white Trump voters, heads filled with half-assed ideas.[3]) Does it make any difference? Doesn’t she qualify for a beating, too? Why not? If you’re complicit with fascists because you’re not down with beating and “no-platforming” them, you’re certainly complicit if you physically intervene to stop the beating.
Beating up fascists can only be a tactic, not a strategy or a purpose. Antifa is tactics driving strategy. In the kindest conception, it’s tactics trying to spontaneously ignite a strategy. Been there, done that (not): The Weatherman, of whom I knew a few, had a similar idea—that street-fighting would attract working-class support. And they at least fought the cops, not fellow citizens. They didn’t go around beating on the pro-war, Nixonite union members who could be found heckling antiwar demonstrations.
But when you put the tactical cart before the strategic horse, none of it works. In revolutionary politics, tactics are driven by strategy, which is driven by a purpose—which for socialists is the overthrow of the capitalist state by a mass democratic movement that seizes control of the capital wealth of society. For that, you need a lot of people who know exactly what they’re here for at all times. Good tactics, whether passive or aggressive, are the ones that help with that.
Antifa groups themselves understand this, and make exactly the same kinds of political effectiveness calculations for exactly the same reasons that they deride their critics for insisting on.
Aren’t there a whole lot of nasty actors antifa is not beating and no-platforming? Will antifa show up with their righteous bodies and fists to prevent the next Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton speech at one of the higher academies of the empire, and beat up on the people attending? They are just two of the well-dressed people who are responsible—via indisputable direct action and not some post-modern speech-equivalent—for more violence to people, and non-white, non-American people in particular, than all the Pepe Froggers put together. In fact, speaking of fascism, they are two of the people most responsible for putting actual, Hitler-loving Nazis in power in a European government for the first time since WWII. What’s the antifa position on that? Why shouldn’t anti-fascists beat up on anyone wearing an “I’m With Her” shirt?
Hateful speech is actual violence? Advocacy of racist, supremacist, and explicitly or implicitly genocidal policies or principles is actual genocidal violence? Can we expect to see antifa brigades coming out punching at every Zionist rally or speech? Aren’t Zionists ethno-religious supremacists—“no less supremacist, no less racist” than American white nationalists, let alone run-of-the mill Trump voters? Don’t they materially and politically support actual rather than speech-equivalent violence, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid? In fact, don’t white nationalists call themselves, quite accurately, “White Zionists.”[4]
In either of these cases, and many others predicated on “We’re capitalists [and imperialists, and Zionists], and that’s just the way it is,” if antifa isn’t showing up to punch people out, why not?
Antifa activists who would say, as I bet most would, “No, that’s not necessary or desirable,” are making a political judgement as to what’s most likely to be effective for building a popular movement in the American context—where, they recognize, there are a lot of non-evil people and potential allies who hang out at Democratic Party and pro-Israel events with a lot of half-assed ideas in their heads. And that’s the same kind of political judgement that underlies my and others’ criticism of antifa’s recent actions and proposed trajectory.
Why, specifically, does antifa make the political judgement to demur from kicking ass at some events where “violence-equivalent” political speech is voiced, rather than at others? Who gets the sticks and stones, and whose words can never hurt? Who has authority, on the basis of what political principle, to make such distinctions and decisions?
Or is it not a political judgment at all, but rather a matter of implicit sympathetic identification with some kinds of people rather than others. Is it, for example, because antifa can perceive liberal Zionists with half-assed, pernicious, self-protective identity notions in their heads as potential allies, in ways that they cannot perceive working-class people with half-assed, pernicious, self-protective identity notions? Whose minds are going to be harder to change?
And who is and isn’t seeing these questions?
Finally, I think, one of the major things that remains unseen in the whole antifa strategy is its implicit disregard of a politics of class solidarity in favor of a politics of solidarity based on like-mindedness. Not a crime, but an error.
I think most leftists can understand that our crucial task is to build popular support, which we lack, for a mass movement based on class solidarity. But here’s a radical notion that American leftists often forget: That movement has to be built with the working-class we have, not the one we wish for. Which means the axis of solidarity around which it’s built has to be material interest, not like-mindedness.
For socialists, solidarity is not a matter of prior agreement. You don’t have to agree with me for me to defend your interests.
This is bedrock socialism, historical materialist as opposed to idealist politics, communism 101: to demonstrate your support of people whose material interests place them in the working class, no matter what ideas they have in their heads (or what kind of hat they wear on them).
We’re not in advanced stage of struggle for and with those who already agree with us, but in an early stage of struggle for and we hope withthose who are always, unjustly, being crushed by the wealth they create—whether they agree with us at the moment or not. Agreement doesn’t precede solidarity; it results from it.
You get popular support by defending and fighting for the people’s material interests, not by looking for people who have the same ideas as you, and attacking those who don’t.
It all proceeds from there, or it doesn’t proceed at all. There’s no running this film backwards.
Why? Because most people in a capitalist society with a capitalist educational and media and cultural apparatus are going to have a lot of fucked-up ideas in their heads. Shark Tank, Bling-Bling, and all. Everybody in capitalist society has been “taught wrong on purpose.”
It’s not that the stupid ideas don’t matter, and it’s not that those who are staunchly committed reactionaries can’t be targeted differently than those going along casually. It’s certainly not that reactionary and socially-destructive actions motivated by stupid ideas shouldn’t be firmly opposed with necessary force. It’s that 1) Making no distinction between casual followers and staunch leaders on the right both takes for granted and encourages the solidarity between the two—precisely what we should be working to challenge and disrupt, and 2) demonstrating solidarity based on material interest is the way you get people to listen to you and start maybe changing their ideas—whatever fucked-up ideas they’ve been deliberately taught.
Riddle me this: For revolutionary socialists, if there are a lot of people attracted to right-wing ideas—and there are, especially right-wing socio-economic ideas—whose fault is that? Is our job to punish them for it?
A right-wing populist movement (if there is one) won’t be defeated by sucker-punching; It will only be defeated by creating a left-wing populist movement that draws the majority of people to it. Our job, it seems to me, is to figure out how to build that.
Consider the historic and contemporary civil-rights movements, the fights for racial equality and justice that continue against the New Jim Crow of racialized urban policing and mass incarceration: Are these based on the premise that all, or even most, African-Americans carry around only righteously progressive ideas in their heads? That we should start fights with those who don’t, to punish them for their violence-equivalent wrong thinking? (Which is exactly what antifa did in April in Berkeley, by the way, where there were African-American Trump supporters.)
No leftist, let alone a socialist-communist leftist, would think anything so ridiculous. Yet somehow, a working-class guy or gal, white or black, with a MAGA hat is a target to punch, never a potential comrade to address. Wrong hat on, wrong ideas in, head. Must punch.
Well, wearing a MAGA hat should not disqualify one from being addressed as a potential comrade any more than should wearing a Nation of Islam hat. I think Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam is based on a reactionary and bizarre religious theory of the world and human nature. So? What’s the basis of solidarity with black people? What’s the basis of solidarity with working-class people of all races?
Aretha spelled it out.
No one in the working class should be beaten just for expressing half-assed ideas.
Call me what you will for thinking that. Names will never hurt me.
[1] The A.C.L.U. Needs to Rethink Free Speech – The New York Times, The case for restricting hate speech – LA Times, 40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities | Pew Research Center
[2] Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick , German Lopez, What the “alt-left” was actually doing in Charlottesville., The case against antifa – Vox, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBNU7BhJBVM , The Ugly Side of Antifa – Leighton Woodhouse
[3] Matt Labash, A Beating in Berkeley. Trump got 28% of the Latino, 27% of the Asian American, and 8% of the Black votes, CNN Exit Polls 2016.
[4] David Lloyd, Racial supremacy and the Zionist exception – Mondoweiss, Nada Elia, Birds of a feather: White supremacy and Zionism | Middle East Eye, Paul Larudee, The Zionist Exception to the March for Racial Justice | Dissident Voice
JIM KAVANAGH—I think that Antifa activists are fighting a battle against an enemy deserving of contempt, but undeserving of the attention and intense energy being directed against it, energy on which that enemy only feeds. In the process, they are ignoring other, more crucial battles against powerful and dangerous enemies, and throwing away a crucial tool (free speech) needed to fight all those enemies. For me, antifa action falls into the category defined by one of history’s shrewdest quips: “It’s worse than a crime; it’s an error.”
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It seems like direct action and more decisive forms of bringing the issues of massive ecoanimal abuse to the forefront are taking off in various countries. Animal liberation —indissolubly tied to enormous abuses of the planet itself by a corrupt and deranged system—may prove to be one of the toughest and most controversial struggles in history. The object of these activists struggles, as always, is to get humans to admit that the liberation of animals is a legitimate civil disobedience cause.
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Glenn Greenwald hails the group:
"Rescuing animals from factory farms and slaughterhouses in order to save them from torture is 100% noble, & those who do it are heroes..."
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Voici Malcom, le cochon que nous avons exfiltré et libéré ce matin de l'abattoir Tradival. Il est arrivé dans un sanctuaire privé.
"HERE IS MALCOM, THE PIG WE HAVE LIBERATED THIS MORNING FROM THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE TRADIVAL. HE HAS BEEN TAKEN TO A PRIVATE SANCTUARY."
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269LibérationAnimale Retweeted
Rescuing animals from factory farms and slaughterhouses in order to save them from torture is 100% noble, & those who do it are heroes.
-is a complete necessity in animal rights movement. Take radical action now!
#ForceTheLiberation#CompassionIsNotACrimeCongrats to
@DxEverywhere for this slaughterhouse assault and rescue they lead today. They show that direct action and civil disobedience - -
269LibérationAnimale Retweeted
Open rescue of lamb from slaughterhouse. One of several being rescued currently.
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PARTAGEZ: Les "Nuits Debout devant les abattoirs" édition 2017. Par notre vidéaste
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Menées dans les abattoirs ces derniers mois comme des actes politiques servant l’intérêt général.
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Déjà condamnés à de la prison avec sursis, se battent devant les tribunaux pour faire reconnaître les opérations de désobéissance civile-
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Admettre le droit de résistance à l’oppression lorsqu’il s’agit d’animaux non-humains, les deux dirigeants de notre association, -
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269LibérationAnimale Retweeted
Dans cette difficile période d’intense répression judiciaire. Jugés comme de simples « délinquants » par une justice peu encline à-
"During this period of intense judicial repression. Treated like "common delinquents" by a justice little inclined [t consider our cause as just or meritorious]...
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L’association 269Life Libération Animale vous propose à la vente un nouveau produit visant directement à soutenir notre stratégie offensive-
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SUPPORT: The illustration below is available as prints for purchase, including the original, as a way to gather funds for this struggle.
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Photographie de l'association 269 Life Libération Animale |
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Par respect pour les animaux, leur corps, leur vie : voyons en eux des êtres conscients, doués de sensibilité. Refusons leur exploitation.
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