The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

[This is the text of my remarks for the panel "Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Fascism:  Challenges for Anti-Capitalists" at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in Vermont earlier this month.  The panel also featured remarks by Rami El-Amine and by my brother, Peter Staudenmaier.  A brief but productive open discussion focused heavily on questions of solidarity.  The panel was an outgrowth of my presentation at the National Conference on Organized Resistance last spring in Washington DC.  Also worth looking at is the exchange between myself and Rami El-Amine in the latest issue of Upping the Anti-.  At some point the panel should be available online as an audio file, and I will link to it here.]

Hi, my name is Mike.  A big part of the reason I was interested in this panel is that many (possibly most) of the defining political experiences of my life have come through participation in either anti-imperialist or anti-fascist work.  For most of my adult life I have engaged in solidarity work with the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and I have been less centrally involved in support work with other Latin American revolutionary movements.  At the same time, on a largely parallel track, I have been part of multiple Anti-Racist Action-led organizing efforts against the Klan and against neo-Nazis, including a lengthy midwestern campaign against the World Church of the Creator and its now-imprisoned leader Matthew Hale.

These experiences, along with a lot of reading and discussion, have led me to certain conclusions about the character of capitalism and about the prospects for a liberatory revolution, which resonate with the concept of the “three way fight” that has been developed in fits and starts over the past several years, largely through the blog threewayfight.blogspot.com.  The three way fight analysis is far from being any sort of coherent theory, but in essence it represents a refusal to group all bad politics as being somehow part of the same capitalist system, and a related refusal to accept all resistance movements as automatic allies.

About a year ago, I began to reflect on the ways in which the three way fight framework might help move beyond some simplistic and one-sided sorts of analysis that I saw coming out of contemporary anti-imperialist and anti-fascist milieu.  In a post-9/11 world, many of these questions were most prominently highlighted in the context of debates around Israel/Palestine, and the related issues of islamophobia and antisemitism within the left itself.  (Although, had I chosen to speak primarily from my own experiences, I might have focused on a range of issues more centered on the Western Hemisphere – immigration and the Minutemen, Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” the resurgence in Guatemala of dictator-turned populist Efrain Rios-Montt, or the twists and turns of the Puerto Rican independence movement over the past decade – all of which touch on similar questions in somewhat less high-profile settings.) 

And so, last spring I gave a talk in Washington DC at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, in which I argued that radical movements needed to embrace “both anti-fascism and revolution.”  I don’t want to rehash the arguments made in that talk (which can be read, along with a response by my co-panelist Rami El-Amine, in the brand new issue of the journal Upping the Anti-, which is probably available for sale somewhere around here).  Instead, I want to focus my attention on a handful of key points:  the question of fascism; the resilience of capitalism; the character of solidarity; and the importance of revolution.  Each of these has some abstract implications for theory, but I will attempt to focus on some of the ground-level strategic aspects of each.

First, fascism.  This is a troublesome little word for a big and troublesome problem, one that has defied neat and tidy definitions for decades.  It has never been a singular, unified term.  There are the differences between fascism as a movement and fascism in power, electorally-minded fascists and those committed to direct action, fascism as corporatist economics and fascism as racialist ultranationalism, etc.  And there are differences between those who view fascism as a top-down phenomenon, the last resort of capitalism in crisis, and those (myself included) who view fascism as an insurgent challenge to capitalism from the right. 

I tend to adopt my comrade Matthew Lyons’ working definition, knowing that there are almost certainly exceptions and variations:  “Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist control of the state while defending class exploitation.”  I’m not thrilled with this definition, but it will work for now.  And I will readily concede that those of us advocating for a three way fight analysis have probably overplayed fascism as a metaphor for right-wing revolutionary movements that look substantially different in the details from the historical models.  But I believe that the term still has significant value insofar as it forces people to critically assess movements like al-Qaeda, or Rios-Montt’s Guatemalan Republican Front, or – closer to home – some factions of the Minutemen, that are in clear opposition to dominant forms of capitalism and imperialism but also propound an anti-liberatory politics that leftists must oppose.  Even if we as radicals don’t think that fascism is the proper term for these and other movements, we still need to recognize that not all forms of anti-capitalist radicalism are liberatory.

Second, capitalism.  The three way fight analysis takes a sort of unity-in-diversity approach to understanding capitalism, which while hardly novel is worth restating here.  While US imperialism is currently the dominant economic structure in the world today, it is hardly the only one.  China, Russia, and the EU all constitute competing factions within global capital.  And of course capitalism is increasingly transnational and autonomous from any and all nation-states.  Yet on a number of issues – the “global war on terror” is a key example – these division are routinely set aside in the interests of preserving the hegemonic position of global capital in all its many forms.  Capitalism has also been known to jettison features that have previously been defining, all in the interests of expanding profit; thus, women in much of the world are now incorporated directly into production in ways that were uncommon even a generation ago.

More interesting still, is the well-documented ability of capitalism to reel in seemingly radical organizations and one-time revolutionaries with the promise of immediate success through reform struggles and/or elections.  An entire generation of anti-imperialist movements across the third world learned this lesson the hard way in the 1980’s.  I’m sure everyone in this room has had experiences of this sort on a smaller scale, and to accept this reality does not in any way imply a rejection of reform struggles as such, because the efforts made by capital are not always unalloyed successes.  The “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela, for instance, includes both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist elements.  From where I sit, the struggles in Lebanon being led by Hezbollah seem to contain similar contradictions.  But in a world where the prospects for revolution depend upon the defeat of these pro-capitalist elements through popularizing and expanding existing participatory democratic tendencies into a dual power within social movements, a complicated picture of Chavez or of Hezbollah – one that neither sanctifies nor slanders the movements they lead – is essential.

Third, solidarity.  Another tricky term.  Recently there has been a renewed discussion within the anti-imperialist left of the proper form for solidarity to take, in part resulting from a confrontation at the US Social Forum in Atlanta, where a Jewish Israeli woman was criticized for presuming to define the acceptable limits of Palestinian resistance.  The woman was speaking on behalf of an international feminist human rights organization named MADRE, which subsequently issued a press release clarifying their stance on what they described as “strategic solidarity.”  In response, a number of left groups and Palestinian solidarity organizations produced a written response, defining solidarity in the terms offered by a Palestinian participant in the initial confrontation:  “Stand behind me, don’t divide me, and don’t speak for me.” 

This dispute is strikingly reminiscent of the debates around “unconditional support” that consumed the Latin American solidarity movement of the 1970’s and 80’s.  While some groups in essence argued that it was effectively pro-imperialist (if not outright racist) for white North American radicals to publicly criticize Castro’s Cuba or Sandinista-led Nicaragua, others responded that when “unconditional support” became uncritical support the real losers were everyday people struggling to realize their revolutionary aspirations not only in Cuba and Nicaragua, but in countries throughout Latin America.  MADRE as an organization emerged from the Latin American solidarity milieu, but their press release made mention of a different historical example:  the attacks against Iranian feminists and communists under the Islamic Republic in the early years of the revolution.  I won’t attempt to defend the initial actions by the woman at the Social Forum (I wasn’t there, but it sounds like she behaved inappropriately), but I think the MADRE press release is mostly unobjectionable, if a little uninspiring.  And the “stand behind me” model of solidarity should be troubling in an era where the Zapatistas have deliberately encouraged a version of solidarity that calls for struggling side by side rather than behind one another.  Similarly, a recognition of divisions within movements should not be mistaken for an attempt to create divisions where there are none.  And, of course, admonitions against speaking for others should not be used to silence those who would speak for themselves.

Finally, revolution.  I use this word a lot, and I think of it as a dividing line of sorts.  Movements that are committed to revolutionary struggle are movements that I tend to take seriously, both for their liberatory and for their repressive potentials.  But revolution is another tricky word, often used to advertise things that ought not really be thought of as revolutionary, be it Chevrolet or Chavez.  How can we help renew the anarchist tradition?  I suggest that we can help reconceptualize revolution, and liberatory revolution in particular.  A liberatory revolution must be anti-capitalist, but it must be more than that:  it must challenge (in the words used to describe this panel) “a series of oppressions that are not neatly reducible to ‘class’”, including white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism.  It must challenge islamophobia and antisemitism wherever they are encountered.  It must be both anti-imperialist and anti-fascist.