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.

When I was eighteen, my older brother Peter gave me some essays to read on feminist philosophy.  Those essays contributed to me becoming a philosophy major in college, and they contributed to me identifying radical feminism as one of the most important political influences on me during my college years.  In preparing for this talk, I’ve been re-reading some older feminist writings that speak to questions of privilege.  The work of bell hooks (whose early book Feminist Theory from Margin to Center was the source for my title this morning) and Marilyn Frye have been getting my attention these last few weeks.  Frye in particular is one of my favorite philosophers, and her book The Politics of Reality is one of my all-time favorite books of philosophy.  The sharpness and clarity of her writing, in essays like “Oppression” and “On Being White” hold up quite well 25 years later, and I will come back to these writings periodically during this talk. 

But I’m not a philosopher anymore, now I’m a historian.  And as a historian, I’ve spent much of the past several years researching the history of a small, mostly white revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970’s and 80’s:  the Sojourner Truth Organization.  STO, as it was often known, was never very large, and it is largely forgotten today, even within the revolutionary left.  During its existence, the group was frankly notorious for its attachment to the white skin privilege analysis.  It was never the only group to adopt this understanding of white supremacy, but it was one of the most vocal.  This talk isn’t strictly speaking about STO, but my research informs the core of my trajectory today. 

*        *        *

But before we get to the seventies, we have to go a few steps back.  The roots of the white skin privilege analysis lie in the work of WEB DuBois, a black Marxist historian whose most important book was Black Reconstruction in America:  1860-1880 (published in 1935).  Here, DuBois used a provocative phrase “the public and psychological wage” in order to explain the pervasiveness of white racism during the period after the Civil War.  In his words:

“It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.  They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.  They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.  The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.  Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”

For three decades, the white left was supremely unconcerned with this idea of the “wages of whiteness” (to use the historian David Roediger’s phrasing).  But in the 1960’s, a handful of white radicals began to explore the broader implications of DuBois’ analysis, expanding its application beyond Reconstruction and turning it into a general theory of US History.  Foremost among this small number were Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev), who, not coincidentally, helped found STO at the end of 1969, and Ted Allen, later the author of The Invention of the White Race.  (In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Allen and Ignatin met initially through their membership in a small Stalinist sect, and that both men remained attached to a version of Stalinism throughout the 1960’s.  It is a central premise of my talk that the white skin privilege concept can and should be assessed independent of its founders’ Stalinist background.)

According to Ignatin, Allen coined the term “white skin privilege,” in a 1965 speech commemorating John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry.  Throughout the late 60’s and early 70’s, these two men produced a flurry of essays detailing the philosophical, political, and historical aspects of their emerging theory.  Allen and Ignatin never built their argument around moralistic sermonizing of the sort that some radicals now associate with the term “white skin privilege.”  Instead, they made what amounted to a strategic argument concerning the prospects for revolution in the United States, maintaining that white skin privilege kept white people from uniting with people of color in anti-capitalist struggle.  In the earliest elaboration of their theory, the pamphlet “The White Blindspot” (another DuBois reference, naturally), Ignatin argued that:

As the building block for this analysis, it is essential to understand what white skin privileges are, and what they are not. In Ignatin and Allen’s view, the privileges covered a wide terrain, including the opportunity to be first hired and last fired in an employment context, access to preferential treatment at the hands of police and government bureaucrats, and in general the same sort of deference and courtesy that had been described in Black Reconstruction.  These privileges were relative rather than absolute:  first hired and last fired, for instance, meant that whites could expect that they would always get jobs more easily than blacks, not that there were always jobs available for any whites that wanted them. 

While rejecting the notion that racist ideas and attitudes were hardwired into white people, Ignatin and Allen refused to accept the liberal position that racism could be eliminated simply by changing people’s minds.  Further, despite the use of the word “skin” in white skin privilege, Allen, Ignatin, and others, argued strenuously that “whiteness” itself was a political rather than biological category.  This fluidity allowed groups of people, such as various immigrant communities, eventual access to “whiteness” and its privileges, contingent upon their willingness to reject any solidarity with black people.  This was a dynamic historical process, not some abstract permanent feature of genetics.  Thus, according to Ignatin and Allen, what could be done could also be undone.  White skin privileges could be repudiated in struggle, and this created the possibility of a reunified proletariat capable of overthrowing capitalism.  One more passage from “The White Blindspot” can illuminate this point, despite the Leninist overtones of its rhetoric:

*        *        *

STO was by no means the only group to take the white skin privilege concept seriously.  As early as 1969, the initial statement by the Weather faction of SDS (later the Weather Underground) made extensive use of the idea that white workers were “privileged.”  In contrast to STO, however, this version of the white skin privilege analysis was often interpreted as a basis for writing off the revolutionary potential of the white working class and focusing the efforts of white revolutionaries on solidarity work with revolutionary nationalists both domestically and internationally.  When the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was initiated in 1974, it also adopted this version of the theory.

Ignatin and Allen both challenged this particular form of the analysis, because both men were strongly committed to organizing within the white working class as a part of a comprehensive strategy for revolution.  But these differences were minor compared to the differences both STO and WUO/PFOC had with the vast bulk of the white left during the first half of the 1970s.  Maoists, Trotskyists, and anarchists were never more united than in their dismissal of the white skin privilege concept.  It was denounced as moralistic, guilt-tripping, counter-productive and impractical.  In retrospect, we can see the kernel of truth in these criticisms when looking at the more extreme articulations of the WUO/PFOC version of the analysis.  But in the form developed by Allen and Ignatin, and by STO organizationally throughout the 1970’s, this criticism seems to miss the point.

Despite the best efforts of its detractors, there was a slow but steady diffusion of the white skin privilege idea over the course of the 1970’s, aided somewhat by the shrill attacks on the theory that were advanced in movement publications like the Guardian newspaper.  A growing number of young radicals were drawn to the analysis, including many white women (and especially lesbians) who saw parallels between their experiences under patriarchy with those of black people under white supremacy.  In fact, one could argue that the adoption of the white skin privilege concept by a segment of the white feminist movement was the catalyst for the general diffusion of the idea within the white left over the course of the 1980’s.  The relative openness to feminism of groups like Prairie Fire, and the often dismissive attitude taken by STO, meant that some versions of the analysis were more widely disseminated than others, much (I would argue) to the long-term detriment of the theory and of the white left.

In the early 1980’s, the emerging feminist and lesbian presence within the academy further contributed to the good fortune of the white skin privilege analysis.  The pioneering work of lesbian philosopher Marilyn Frye (who I mentioned earlier) represents the best elements of this work, grounded in a real-world analysis of oppression and resistance.  For instance, in the essay “Oppression,” she articulates quite clearly the every-day stakes involved in patriarchy, using the framework of (but not the term) privilege:

Too often, however, popular trends in academic theory converged with the jargon potential inherent in a formulation like “white skin privilege” to generate a range of “privilege”-based analyses.  Many of these, such as male privilege, heterosexual privilege, middle class privilege, able-bodied privilege, and others, make sense on an elementary level as a description of reality, but have proven highly problematic when they have been incorporated into elaborate theories, convoluted analysis of popular culture and daily life, or under-examined resistance strategies.

Among anarchists, however, even an enthusiasm for radical feminism during the 1980’s didn’t result in a quick embrace of the white skin privilege analysis.  Most anarchists of the 1980’s adopted a sort of flattened view of oppression, in which all forms of hierarchy were basically interchangeable and only a sort of under-theorized anti-statism really defined what anarchism meant.  There were rumblings of a different approach in magazines like Kick it Over and Open Road, (why are the Canadians always so ahead of the curve like that?) but the sea change really began with the formation of Love and Rage at the end of 1989.  Initially conceived as a continental anarchist newspaper, Love and Rage eventually became a “Revolutionary Anarchist Federation.”  By the time of L&R’s demise nine years later, the anarchist movement in North America had changed dramatically in its assessment of capitalism, of oppression, and of resistance.  Love and Rage consistently challenged the old orthodoxies of anarchism, and in particular focused less attention on “class” as it had previously been understood, and more attention on forms of oppression like white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, among others.  In this context, the adoption of privilege-based theories of oppression was unsurprising. 

In the decade since Love and Rage disbanded, privilege-speak has become commonplace throughout the anarchist milieu.  Publications as divergent as the Northeastern Anarchist and Green Anarchy have run pieces that incorporate the language of privilege.  The most important exceptions to this shift are, naturally, older anarchist publications like the Fifth Estate and Anarchy Magazine, although even these have probably included references on occasion.

*        *        *

Some of you may have noticed that the published description of this talk used the phrase “for better AND for worse” to describe the impact of the white skin privilege analysis on anarchist politics.  By this point it should be clear that I have mixed feelings about the general category of “privilege” and the current manifestations of the white skin privilege analysis in particular.  In essence, I endorse the basic outline of white skin privilege as a framework for understanding how white supremacy operates on a day-to-day basis.  The same is true, generally speaking, for male privilege, heterosexual privilege, and other conceptualizations built on the same model.  I know that in my personal life I have benefited from these three sets of privilege, among others.

Beyond simple accuracy as a narrative of oppression, the various privilege-based theories have another major advantage over other understandings of oppression:  they provide a helpful challenge to traditional top-down approaches that focus exclusively – sometimes even conspiratorially – on the actions of the ruling class.  By emphasizing the participation of everyday people in the continuing experience of oppression, privilege narratives provide at least the opportunity to place human agency at the center of strategies for revolution.  Once again, what has been done can be undone.  And again, Frye sheds some light on this in her essay “On Being White:  Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy:”

Most of my concerns with regard to the white skin privilege analysis (and with the other theories modeled on it) arise when the analysis is incorporated too easily into particular strategies for social change.  I will close my talk by briefly outlining four different problems that plague present-day versions of the white skin privilege concept.  I will call them:  1) the substitution problem; 2) the voluntarism problem; 3) the liberalism problem; and 4) the avoidance problem.

The substitution problem was one that afflicted STO almost from its inception.  Put simply, the issue was that STO behaved as if the black revolution was the proletarian revolution.  A classic example of this confused logic can be seen in an early STO pamphlet titled “The United Front Against Imperialism?,” where the group argued that

When the black movement increasingly turned toward reformism, entrepreneurship models and electoralism, the flaws inherent in this line of argument became crystal clear.  Nonetheless, many white leftists today use a similar litmus test to assess social movements, believing that the repudiation of white skin privilege can be completed via the knee-jerk endorsement of movements of color.  In some ways this is akin to the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic so common among those who identify as anti-imperialists today.

The idea of “repudiation” is also the core of the voluntarism problem, which too often applies even to those white radicals smart enough to avoid the substitution problem.  Race Traitor, for instance, approaches white skin privileges as if they can single-handedly be cast off by people who have previously been identified as white.  Unfortunately, however, privileges of this sort are granted by others, not affirmatively chosen by individuals.  As Frye noted, it is not possible to volunteer oneself out of the white race, no matter how much we might wish to do so.  Rather, the destruction of white supremacy will necessarily involve an overhaul of society, or it will not come to pass at all.

The nature of this overhaul is at the heart of the liberalism problem, which I have argued previously is exemplified by the work of the Catalyst Project, despite the best intentions of its participants.  To the extent that white skin privilege is understood to be an impediment to “racial justice” and “liberation,” the strategy for ending white supremacy is reduced to a process of ameliorating of social inequality, apparently within the confines of capital and the state.  Revolution is reduced to a transformation in consciousness and what the situationists called “everyday life,” rather than indicating a comprehensive process for re-working all social relations, whether economic, political, or cultural. 

Finally, there’s the avoidance problem, which has been highlighted quite effectively in a thoughtful essay by the Philadelphia based activist Michelle O’Brien, “Whose Ally?  Thinking Critically About Anti-Oppression Ally Organizing.”  O’Brien argues that the rhetoric of white skin privilege provides a convenient way for white radicals to exempt ourselves from the substantive work of combating white supremacy while feeling good about ourselves because we have a sophisticated analysis and speak in a sort of jargon or code that other white radicals will be impressed by.  She offers the following example from her personal experience:

I will admit that as I re-read the text of this talk last night, this description hit dangerously close to home; I will leave it to others to determine whether I am myself engaged in a process of avoidance.  Anecdotes like this don’t necessarily invalidate the conceptual framework provided by the white skin privilege concept, but they do call into question its frequent, sometimes all-purpose usage among white anarchists and other white radicals.  The question then becomes:  does the analysis help us make sense of society and oppression in the new millennium?  And if it does, can it still be saved at this late date from its problems?

The White Skin Privilege workshop draws heavily on my STO research, but will also include my thoughts on the current state of "privilege" as a narrative device for understanding and resisting oppression in general and white supremacy in particular.  I’m hoping to inspire a thoughtful and informed discussion of how anarchists can and should think about race relations.  The description from the conference materials reads as follows:

"For better and for worse, much contemporary anarchist analysis of oppression is overlaid with the terminology of "privilege." The original template for this kind of thinking is the white skin privilege concept, which is both popular and contentious among North American anarchists today. This talk will focus on the emergence of the white skin privilege idea within the white New Left during the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially in and around the Sojourner Truth Organization, a small revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during this period. After tracing the entry of these ideas into the anarchist vernacular during the 1980s, this talk will conclude with a discussion of the current state of the white skin privilege analysis, and an assessment of some implications for present-day anarchist theory and practice."

The panel is a follow-up on my presentation last spring at the National Conference on Organized Resistance in Washington, DC, previously posted on my blog here.  The other participants include Rami El-Amine, who wrote one of the main pieces that inspired my talk at NCOR, "Anti-Arab Racism, Islamophobia, and the Anti-War Movement."  El-Amine has also written a response to my talk, published (along with the text of my original presentation) in the newly released issue 5 of the Canadian journal Upping the Anti-.  My brother Peter, who has long prioritized an anti-fascist analysis and a concern with antisemitism, will also participate.  And the panel will be moderated by Andrea Maria, a board member of the IAS and an experienced radical.  The conference materials describe the panel this way:

"Both contemporary capitalism and resistance against it are in part defined by, and have developed in response to, a series of oppressions that are not neatly reducible to "class." In a post-9/11 world, Islamophobia and antisemitism are particularly contentious examples of this dynamic. To what extent does the continued hegemony of global capitalism depend on these two forms of oppression? In what ways have anti-capitalist resistance movements intentionally or inadvertently replicated these same phenomena? This panel will attempt to come to grips with the contradictory character of both capitalism and anti-capitalism by bringing together advocates of various radical paradigms, including anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the "three-way fight" analysis."

A month or two after Nico was born, we decided we would bite the bullet and buy a double stroller, reversing our righteous disdain for all the yuppie parents we see on a daily basis crowding the sidewalks with their double-wide joggers.  Anne found a good deal on Craig’s List, and when she contacted the sellers, they gave her an address that was oddly familiar to me.  I wracked my brain to figure out where the street was and what intersections it was near.  Aha!  Suddenly it came back to me:  turns out the sellers lived on land that was once the Stewart-Warner Factory.

From at least the mid-twentieth century until its final demise in the early 1990’s, Stewart-Warner was one of the largest factories on the north side of Chicago.  In the early 1970’s, STO decided to make Stewart-Warner one of their major sites of industrial concentration, and several members obtained jobs there.  They were not alone:  other radical groups, including the October League and the Revolutionary Union, also sent cadre into the factory, creating an organizing environment that was possibly unique in Chicago.  The draw was at least two-fold:  first, the factory was centrally located, unlike many other factories in the Chicago area that were on the outskirts of the city itself.  Second, and more important in the minds of STO’s organizers, the demographics of the workforce were quite mixed, with an equal number of men and women, and whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans all working side by side. 

This must have seemed like the perfect laboratory in which to test out the group’s theories of workplace organizing and opposition to white supremacy.  Indeed, over the years, the group organized many campaigns inside the factory, some more successful than others.  At the same time, the various splits within STO during the course of the 1970’s created a situation where many former members of the group also worked at Stewart Warner.  As a result, at least one former member today remembers Stewart-Warner as having been the archetype of STO’s factory work. 

Given STO’s inability to grasp and confront the macroeconomic forces behind deindustrialization, it is perhaps fitting that when Stewart-Warner was finally shut down in the early nineties – production was moved to a maquiladora in Ciudad Juarez, naturally – the land was purchased by a developer.  The factory was torn down, and by 1996 the space that had once been a major hotbed of industrial working class radicalism had been transformed into a glaring symbol of class stratification:  a gated community. 

And eleven years later this gated community was home to a wealthy couple who had received three (count ‘em, three) double strollers from friends and family when their second child was born.  Two of the strollers went up for sale on Craig’s list, and in late June I drove over to pick one of them up for the very affordable price of $40.  The sellers were kind enough to give me the code to get through the gate, and I was treated to the sight of a “community” that could not possibly have looked less like the real Chicago just outside the fence.  The place looked like a New England village, with fake cobble stone streets and vinyl siding that was supposed to look like wood.  It was a fascinating glimpse of a very different life. 

I asked the sellers if they had any idea what was there before their community was built, and surprisingly they knew that it had been a factory.  I didn’t bother to mention my research, or my one previous visit to the area:  when I was a young anarchist new to Chicago in 1994, I participated in a “free skool” class on “Urban Exploration,” which mostly amounted to breaking into abandoned buildings.  One day we decided to visit the half-demolished hulk that had been the Stewart Warner Factory.  We spent several hours wandering around inside, but at that point I had never heard of STO and I knew nothing about the workplace organizing that had taken place there.  My second visit was on some level more productive, however:  we use the double stroller – or “oh-lair,” as Sofia pronounces it – several times a week.  And every time, I am reminded of a small piece of STO’s history.

So the goal is that sometime in the next few weeks I’ll sit down and map out my next steps on this damn project — a few more interviews, securing a publisher, and continuing on with the manuscript.  Let’s hope I have the time…

****************

Challenges to Capitalism, Challenges for the Left:
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Three Way Fight
Washington, DC     March 11, 2007

This talk is about the present and the future, but I’m a historian, so I want to begin by talking briefly about the past.  The recent past, mind you; specifically, that heady time just five and a half years ago, immediately before the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Until that day, the anti-capitalist movement in the global north was riding a modest wave of success, beginning with the events in Seattle in 1999 and most recently featuring the massive showing in Genoa, Italy in the summer of 2001. 

Those of us who had been active in that cycle of growth were probably over-optimistic about the immediate prospects for building a strongly anti-capitalist movement out of the mish-mash that was known variously as the anti-globalization movement, the global justice movement, or by a variety of other names.  Certainly we were naïve about the state of the world and of the character of the forces arrayed against us. 

But 9-11 took from us one of the most important things that contributed to our limited success:  momentum.  The attacks of that day deflated our sails, although we mostly didn’t recognize it until a year or two later.  At the same time, that year or two changed the entire context in which we operated.  The reasonable pacing of (and relatively easy access to) global economic summits – Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Genoa – was replaced by a much more rapid-fire list of places that were far more difficult to reach:  Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah. 

More fundamentally, our previous understanding of neoliberalism and globalization was challenged, and most of the former anti-globalization movement became convinced that “globalization” was suddenly less pressing than regional geo-political power struggles characterized by terms like “terrorism” or “imperialism,” or “war for oil.”  Especially during the build-up to the Iraq War, many radicals came to believe that divisions within global capital, often described using the old left jargon of inter-imperialist rivalries, had over-powered the global capitalist unity that we believed had characterized the various summits at which we had protested.  (As it happens, these changes seem to have been largely illusory, and the shift in leftwing perspective was shortsighted at best.)

In the aftermath, a small number of us, veterans of a range of movements and struggles, began to develop what seemed to us a somewhat novel way of thinking about the world.  Expanding the insights we had gained from involvement with anti-fascist activities in the preceding decade, we started talking about a three-way fight, about a world best conceptualized by thinking not simply about us versus them, but about them, them and us. 

At its core, the three way fight is a critique of authoritarianism as much as it is a response to fascism.  It is also a way to understand various social movements through a sort of schematic categorization.  The two sets of “them” that I mention here can roughly be taken to represent the capitalists and the fascists, and the “us” can be thought of as the anti-authoritarian revolutionary left.  But the three way fight is not dogma; it requires that anyone who adopts it as a framework take the time to think through a range of questions and come to their own conclusions, whether individually or collectively.  One key question is:  is a given group or organization or movement revolutionary or reformist?  If they are revolutionary, we can then ask, are they aiming for an authoritarian revolution or an anti-authoritarian revolution?  Again, there’s no objectively correct answer to any of these questions and there’s a lot of grey area throughout, but that doesn’t let us off the hook.  We still have to ask them, and we have to come up with some answers, no matter how tentative, in order to move forward.

In this framework, the global capitalist ruling class, whose movements we had tracked from summit to summit over the previous several years, could be thought of as the 800 pound gorilla in the ring, much as it was before 9-11, theories of inter-imperialist rivalry notwithstanding.  The difference was in recognizing that we were not the only, nor even the most important, opposition force on the playing field.  Just as the domestic fascist movement in the US had grown increasingly dangerous – and increasingly revolutionary – over the previous several decades, so too had many revolutionary movements the world over begun to appear more similar to fascism than we had previously understood.  Al-Qaeda was the most prominent example in the period immediately after 9-11.  As J. Sakai argued in the book Confronting Fascism:  Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, “We weren’t thinking about fascism while we watched two 757s full of people fly into the ex-World Trade Center. And maybe we still weren’t thinking of fascism when we heard about the first-ever successful attack on the Pentagon.   But fascism was thinking about us.”

For much of the left, the three way fight analysis of fascism was alien and confusing.  This had a lot to do with decades of common-place usage among radicals where “fascist” was merely a synonym for “very, very bad.”  In developing a more sophisticated understanding of the term, we looked in part to the pioneering work done two and a half decades ago by a long-defunct and little-known revolutionary group called the Sojourner Truth Organization.  STO had spent considerable time and effort in the late 1970’s and early eighties analyzing and organizing against the fascist resurgence then sweeping the US.  In doing so, they highlighted the insurgent, revolutionary potential of fascism, which represented a direct danger not just to the obvious targets of fascist violence (blacks, immigrants, Jews, women, gays and lesbians, and on and on), but also to the revolutionary left, and indeed to the capitalist status quo itself.  Don Hamerquist, co-author with Sakai of Confronting Fascism, had been a leading member of STO, and continues to be a source of innovative ideas for our small sub-current.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those of us from the anti-capitalist movement who were drawn to a three way fight analysis were not the only people to make connections between revolutionary Islamic movements and the fascist tradition.  A range of centrist and right-wing intellectuals and politicians have done so as well, from Christopher Hitchens to President Bush, who last summer caused a stir by using the term “Islamic fascism” repeatedly.  Bush’s comments were made primarily in the context of defending the brutal devastation of Lebanon by the Israeli military, and often he was referring implicitly or explicitly to the Lebanese resistance, led by Hezbollah.

Around that same time, the blog Three Way Fight  became a somewhat high profile forum for left discussion of Hezbollah, largely due to several pieces posted there by Matthew Lyons, an anti-fascist researcher and writer.  Lyons maintained that Hezbollah was an essentially right-wing movement built around a theocratic version of Shiite Islam inspired by Iran’s Islamic Republic, but that it was not helpful to describe them as fascist, largely because they are not revolutionaries.  He also argued strenuously that the left should condemn the Israeli attacks and critically support the Lebanese resistance, even though it was led by Hezbollah. 

This approach was not only a response to knee-jerk left-wing perspectives on the Middle East (both pro-Israel and pro-Hezbollah), but also a challenge to the rest of us involved in developing the three way fight analysis.  Lyons was rightly concerned with the too-easy equation many of us – myself included at times – had made between right-wing anti-imperialism and fascism.  Lyons disagreed with this assessment, and with its abstentionist implications:  if Hezbollah, for instance, was fascist, then no self-respecting radical could in any way support them, any more than we could support Israeli aggression.  In contrast, said Lyons, leftwing revolutionaries should critically support the Lebanese resistance, even as we simultaneously challenged the right-wing character of Hezbollah’s politics.

The response to Lyons and Three Way Fight from some segments of the left was instructive:  despite his specific (and repeated) rejection of the position that “we should denounce Israel and Hezbollah equally,” a number of leftists criticized Lyons and Three Way Fight for being overly critical of Hezbollah.  This challenge was most forcefully articulated by Rami El-Amine, an Arab leftist and co-founder of the magazine Left Turn.  In an essay entitled “Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left,” El-Amine argued that Lyons’ position exemplified the white left’s internalized islamophobia and reflected “a level of acceptance of the lies about Islamism, even by radicals.”  He suggested that Lyon’s analysis of Hezbollah as essentially right wing “will one day become part of one of Hilary Clinton’s … speeches justifying a war on Lebanon and Iran.” 

Putting to one side this frustrating smear, El-Amine’s essay exemplifies one important type of response to the post-9-11 world, a response that argues that the major challenge for the North American left is to overcome the internalized islamophobia we have absorbed from decades of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim politics and media coverage in the US.  If we can’t accomplish this task within our own ranks, El-Amine argues, we will never be able to challenge the mainstream acceptance of this sort of racism.  In his words, “Exposing and ending anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism needs to be a priority in the anti-war movement and the left in general.  Doing so will not only bring more Arabs and Muslims into the movement, but also undercut the racist basis of support for the war.  It will also alleviate the sense of isolation and powerlessness that so many Arabs and Muslims feel as a result of being the targets of war and racism.”

In a world that seems perpetually polarized by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is easy (perhaps too easy) to see in El-Amine’s views a mirror of the arguments put forward by those radicals who believe that the central challenge facing the North American left is the danger posed by our unexamined, or at least under-examined, anti-Semitism.  The disturbing history of anti-Semitism on the left stretches across generations, runs through competing trends, and taints to some extent almost all lineages of the left in this country, as a diverse range of radicals – both Jews and non-Jews – have documented. 

In such a context, argue some leftists, the danger of uncritically supporting a movement like Hezbollah, simply because it stands in clear opposition to US imperial aims in the Middle East, is that to do so requires ignoring, dismissing, or rationalizing those aspects of Hezbollah’s politics that are not simply in opposition to the Israeli oppression of Lebanon, but are truly anti-Semitic.  The end result, it is feared, will be a left that is hopelessly compromised in its principles, and thus incapable of mounting any effective challenge to a global capitalist system that exploits such inconsistencies quickly and effectively.

Some leftists, like the mostly British grouping gathered around the Euston Manifesto, go even further, arguing that the line between opposition to Israeli policy and opposition to Jewish-ness as such is increasingly blurry.  Hezbollah, to stick with our example, not only opposes Israeli involvement in Lebanon, it is also anti-Zionist – it opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.  This can be perceived as simple anti-Zionism more or less uncomplicated by the occasional lapses of Hezbollah’s leadership into anti-Semitism, or  it can be thought of as part of the long-standing history of anti-Semites world-wide attempting to cloak themselves with mantle of legitimate anti-Zionism, or it can be seen as evidence of the deep interpenetration between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. 

Those of us, whether Jewish or not, who strive to be non-anti-Semitic anti-Zionists have long recognized the importance of differentiating the two concepts.  But the Euston Manifesto presents an example of the opposite perspective, denouncing a context where “‘Anti-Zionism’ [that’s in quotes] has now developed to a point where supposed organizations of the left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups.”  It is unclear how much traction this approach has within the US left, although I have corresponded with a handful of anarchists who have either signed the Manifesto or hold positions substantially identical on this question.

I have no interest in drawing false equivalences between these two tendencies on the left, or between the problems they describe.  Both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are real problems within the North American left, but they are not “equal.”  Anti-Semitism has a history going back centuries, and one of its most dangerous qualities is precisely the way in which it exploits the relative privileges granted to Jews.  In this country, for instance, most Jews benefit from white skin privilege.  Anti-Semitism takes these privileges and reflects them in a sort of circus fun-house mirror that makes them appear to be monstrous deformations of ill-gotten power. 

This opens the door to anti-Semitic scapegoating, and plays neatly to some all-too-common forms of left analysis.  For example, the anti-globalization movement’s fascination with “global financial capital” in the form of the IMF and World Bank facilitated repeated infiltrations of the movement by fascists who were upset about “the Jews” who were thought to run “the banks.”  Too many anti-globalization activists accepted this logic and were ensnared by the latent anti-Semitism to which it appeals, in part because many leftists assume that there is some sort of zero-sum exchange between privilege and oppression.  Anti-Semitism belies this simplistic approach, and demonstrates the need for a more dialectical understanding of how oppression works.

At the same time, however, islamophobia meshes all too well with the historic legacies of white supremacy and anti-immigrant racism that have been internalized over generations in this country.  The result is a symbiotic relationship between islamophobia and other forms of racism, such that each nourishes the other in a vicious cycle of fear, hatred and disempowerment.  One could even argue that islamophobia, in the North American context at least, has less to do with religion than it does with race.

In a post-September 11 world, both the frequency and the intensity of anti-Muslim bias have skyrocketed.  So too, ironically, has the acceptance of such bias in black and immigrant (often latino) communities that have themselves been targeted by white supremacy.  Other things being equal (which they usually aren’t), it is far more dangerous to your health, safety, freedom, and economic well-being to be Muslim than it is to be Jewish in the United States today. 

Differences also exist between the two political perspectives I am describing.  El-Amine and others like him, especially in the circle around Left Turn, are committed anti-capitalists and revolutionaries actively involved in anti-war and anti-racist organizing, while most of the Euston signatories are well on their way to friendly confines of liberalism and accommodation with some sort of supposedly humane capitalism.  (It should be noted, however, that this situation is hardly etched in stone; the possibilities for liberal reformism exist in both camps.  We should not assume that all those who are concerned with islamophobia are or will necessarily continue to be revolutionaries, nor should we assume that all those focused on anti-Semitism are or always will be reformists.)

At the same time, however, one legacy of anti-Semitism’s historic tie to the Nazis is a profound awareness within the Euston camp of the need for an anti-fascist politics, which seems lacking in the anti-war movement, and on the left more generally.  This lack of awareness is especially evident in El-Amine’s attempt to tar Lyons with the specter of Hilary Clinton, as if all those who are critical of Hezbollah can be easily grouped as supporters of imperialism.  In a way, this is the flip-side of the argument advanced by some Euston signatories that anti-Zionism is always “effectively” anti-Semitic.

Regardless, both problems are real, and both “camps” (to the extent they really exist outside of my rough schematic) have important truths to tell.  The nineteenth century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously remarked that “freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, but socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”  Something similar is at work here:  anti-fascism without revolution (the Euston position) guarantees capitalism’s continuing misery and devastation, while revolution without anti-fascism (the Left Turn position) all but ensures that the insurgent right will ace out the insurgent left.  We need both anti-fascism and revolution.

Unfortunately, this “both, and” approach is distressingly uncommon within the North American left, largely due to what could be called “bi-polarity:” that is, the dualistic and anti-dialectical tendency to reduce complex situations to two opposing, and static, sides.  In mainstream culture this over-simplification is best exemplified by Bush’s oft-quoted statement that everyone is “either with us, or with the terrorists,” a claim that has been rightly ridiculed by everyone to the left of Christopher Hitchens.  But no matter how dismissive we may be of Bush’s ultimatum, a lot of radical politics is built around similar false dichotomies. 

Within the left, historically speaking, one major strand of bi-polarity can be traced back to the twists and turns of Stalin-era Soviet foreign policy in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Its specific applications were quite often concerned with an analysis of the rising tide of fascism in Europe.  For a time, the Soviets upheld the classic definition of fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”  That is, fascism was nothing more than a variation on western capitalism, and both were to be opposed. 

A few years later, during the relatively short-lived Hitler-Stalin pact, this position was reversed:  suddenly, fascism and Stalinism were allies unified in their opposition to capitalist imperialism.  Once Germany and the Soviet Union had parted company (and the former had invaded the latter), the equation changed yet again:  now the capitalists and the Stalinists made common cause against the total threat posed by fascist “barbarism.”  This formulation resulted in the Yalta Conference, and in the end the division of Europe after World War Two.  This is the stuff Orwell was mocking when he wrote about how “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” in the novel 1984.

Sixty years later, most of the left in North America has finally rid itself of the open trappings of Stalinism, but a surprising vestige remains within our worldview:  the need to reduce every conflict to two sides, us and them.  For the Euston manifesto signatories, “us” means defenders of freedom, democracy and cultural diversity, while “them” refers to the perceived opponents of these concepts – fascists, Islamic fundamentalists, and (non-state) terrorist organizations.  According to this logic, even though the Western capitalist countries have problems and are in need of improvement, they are on “our” side insofar as they provide a necessary bulwark against “them.”

This sort of thinking is probably not very appealing to most of us in this room (which is a good thing), but a possibly more tempting version of the same bi-polarity can be found among the most sharp and level-headed critics of this view.  People like El-Amine, who rightly decries the internalized islamophobia of “us vs. them” narratives like the one implicit in the Euston Manifesto, often argue in terms that suggest a competing “us vs. them” story line:  here, “us” means anti-imperialists, opponents of capitalist globalization, and all who challenge the global hegemony of the United States, while “them” refers to, well, the imperialists, the capitalist globalizers, and those who support the global hegemony of the United States.  This is the Chavez-Ahmadinejad International, and Hezbollah are prominent members. 

Each version of bi-polarity contains its own blindspot:  the Euston position can’t see the legitimacy, indeed the importance, of anti-Zionism, while the El-Amine position can’t see the legitimacy and importance of challenging Islamic fundamentalism.  Within the framework of efforts to develop radical solutions to the various conflicts in the Middle East, a clear vision of both these concepts is essential.  And for North American radicals in particular, burdened as we are with the legacy of white supremacy and its attendant obsession with categorization (of race, of ethnicity, and of types or forms of oppression), a careful analysis of islamophobia and of anti-Semitism may prove to be invaluable in overcoming the limits of our own political frameworks.  As is often the case, in order to effectively present a real challenge to capital, we need to confront the challenges facing the left, in the form of our own political weaknesses. 

Once we expand our horizons beyond the Middle East, the relevance of the three way fight perspective becomes even more clear:  Zionism represents a particular (but definitely peculiar) example of global capitalism, while some (but definitely not all) versions of Islamic fundamentalism serve as examples of contemporary forms of fascism.  (Others, it is important to note, represent competing factions of global capitalism; Iran’s ongoing friendship with Russia and China serves as an example of this alternative.)  In this context, a “them, them, and us” approach seems particularly useful, partly because it better describes the reality within which we find ourselves than any of the “us vs. them” narratives I’ve discussed already, but also partly because it presents a bulwark against the further fracturing of the radical left in North America.

Now I have nothing in principle against fractures and disagreements on the left, but in some circumstances, splintering can cause more harm than good.  Consider the anti-globalization movement, for instance:  here was a highly heterogeneous milieu, one in which conscious anti-capitalists were a distinct minority.  Anti-capitalist revolutionaries were often in the forefront of deliberate splits and fractures, both those designed to exclude fascist elements from the movement, and those intended to draw sharp political lines and create a strong anti-capitalist and revolutionary pole within the movement.  This was a good thing, but our ability to function within that context, while continuously challenging the political limitations of the broader movement, was dependent upon a certain minimum level of ongoing dialogue.  It is this possibility for dialogue that I fear will be lost between those revolutionaries who prioritize resistance to islamophobia and those who emphasize challenges to anti-Semitism.

To understand my fear, it is helpful to look at the decline of the German autonomist movement over the past two decades.  In the 1980’s the West German autonomen were among the most vibrant, militant, and inspiring radical movements anywhere in the world.  Certainly they were not without their problems, but the situation was dynamic and hopeful.  Within the autonomen, several tendencies developed, including the antifas, or anti-fascists, and the anti-imps, or anti-imperialists.  The anti-imps were primarily focused on support for third world liberation movements, including especially Palestinian liberation, where the antifas prioritized domestic and international organizing against the far right. 

After the fall of the Berlin wall, the antifas became concerned with the rapidly rising tide of far-right activity in (the soon to be former) East Germany, and some of them began to emphasize the special responsibility to support Jewish causes that Germans carried as a result of the holocaust.  This led to an opposition to German reunification, which was seen as an opening for an expansionist, even fascist, resurgence.  At the same time, some antifas criticized the anti-imps for their tendency to uncritically support Palestinian struggles, even when they employed terrorist methods and used anti-Semitic rhetoric.  Given the dodgy history of the post-war German left on questions of Israel/Palestine, this was probably pretty reasonable. 

Around the time of the Iraq War in 2003, a minority segment of the antifas took this constellation of ideas and turned them into a principled opposition to German-ness as such, taking the name the anti-Deutsche (anti-Germans).  At this point, the autonomist movement was in a shambles, partly because of changing objective conditions in the reunified Germany, but also in part because of the long-standing splits between tendencies that had less and less contact with each other. 

The most extreme sectors of the anti-Deutsche drew two sets of highly questionable conclusions:  first, the “special responsibility” morphed into a specific responsibility to support the State of Israel; second, the only possible geopolitical counter-weight to resurgent German expansionism was the United States.  Since the US also represented the most stalwart international supporter of Israel, the internal logic was as solid as it was circular.  The result is the occasional spectacle at pro-Israel demonstrations in Germany of small groups of protestors decked out black bloc style carrying US and Israeli flags.  This is bi-polarity taken to absurd extremes.

It is always dangerous to draw parallels between left-wing movements in different countries, and the uniqueness of the German situation (given its history of Naziism and the holocaust) makes it all the more troublesome in this case.  In addition, much of the anti-Deutsche milieu has avoided these comic extremes, while still pressing the left on issues of anti-Semitism.    Further, there is no visible tendency within the US left that shows any immediate propensity toward developing in the direction taken by the anti-Deutsche. 

Nonetheless, the danger of this sort of polarization is real, and must be combated if we are to develop real challenges to capitalism.  One can imagine comparable movements in the North American context developing out of either camp we have discussed here today.  Already, groups like the Workers’ World Party assume a consistent stance of unconditionally supporting any and all movements or governments that are seen to oppose US imperialism, from North Korea to Iran to Venezuela.  Smarter revolutionaries who are sincerely concerned with the dangers of islamophobia could end up following the same logic.  The opposite danger is also visible in the pro-US and pro-Israel stance taken by many Euston signatories.

So, it’s not a question of “choosing” islamophobia or anti-Semitism as the “primary” enemy.  Rather, the more central questions are:  can we develop and maintain a sophisticated and dynamic political analysis in a world where the pull toward simplistic dualism is sometimes overwhelming?  Can we build revolutionary politics in a left that seems perpetually drawn to liberalism, to reform, to what is deemed “really possible”?  Can we help strengthen the social movements in which we participate?  Clarifying our politics is key to making revolution, and a three way fight analysis is an important part of that process.

A recent piece posted to the blog is a critique of Noel Ignatiev’s pamphlet “Introduction to the United States:  An Autonomist Political History,” written by Lauren Ray, some of whose past writings can be found online at the Palestine Solidarity Review.  Ray criticizes the piece from an interesting perspective, challenging the implicit notion that black struggles – and even black people – are necessarily revolutionary.  I don’t agree with everything she has to say, and I think she’s right to believe that the piece – first written as an internal STO document in 1980 – would have been more nuanced had been written a decade later.  Still, she raises a very interesting question regarding STO’s organizational character.  To quote from her piece:

“One point on organization. Someone more informed than myself may be able to comment on the following: what was STO’s conception of itself as an organization? Towards the very end of the article it states something to the effect of it having a character of an organization of white people—was that a conscious organizational choice? I know some groups like the White Panther Party [& the Patriot Party if I remember correctly] chose to organize whites only because as white people they felt their duty and only authority was to speak to their white brethren about white supremacy. I bring this up partially because I’ve heard it argued before that there should be black-only and white-only, etc. organizations rather than multiracial organizations, as that will best allow space and security to people of color to rediscover our own strength and leadership and revolutionary potential. That point alone is not invalid, but some folks take it to the extreme to say that any involvement in multiracial organization is a sign of the false consciousness of the people of color involved (because how can we possibly be self-governing leaders around white people whose inherent nature it is to suppress those instincts) and the egotism of white folks (because they won’t give people of color that space to organize autonomously).

I think it’s important to examine and take some direction on this issue from CLR James & Trotsky’s 1939 discussions in Coyoacan, Mexico on black struggle in the U.S. During these discussions, CLR is debating the validity of American Trotskyists advocating black self-determination. He says, well black folks by and large in the U.S. want their freedom and humanity but aren’t dead set on separation from white folks in order to enjoy that freedom. So he says, yes, black-only organizations are ok, brown only, red, yellow, and blue only if people want, but it has to be granted that folks can and must be self-governing and thus their choice to organize in multiracial collectives is as valid as a choice for race/identity based groups. I’m wondering what STO’s take on this was/would’ve been.”

When I first heard about STO a decade ago, it was in the context of their anti-imperialist period, which was more or less ending when Ignatiev (then Ignatin) wrote the essay in question.  During that period, STO was primarily identified with the white anti-imperialist solidarity movement, which lent its support to various revolutionary nationalist movements, including Puerto Rican and New Afrikan independence struggles and the Iranian students’ movement against the Shah.  As such, I initially believed that STO had an explicit self-conception as an all-white organization. 

As my research has proceeded, I’ve learned of a number of people of color (or “third world people,” in the parlance of the day) who were members of STO at various points.  This included two founding members, one a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the other a Mexican communist, both of whom left the group in the first few years.  Several years later, after having expanded to include a small number of non-white members, STO underwent a difficult split in which the entire “third world caucus” left the organization due to a dispute over their autonomy within the group.  After this point (the beginning of 1978), it is my impression that no further members of color joined the group, although as far as I am aware STO never formally adopted any policy establishing itself as all-white.

Having worked over the years in various groups (mostly but not exclusively built around anarchist politics) that have attempted to exist as multi-racial when in fact they were white-dominated, I am well aware of the problems that frequently beset such efforts.  What is interesting to me about STO is that despite their sophisticated analysis of white supremacy and white skin privilege – which I think was far more nuanced than Ray gives them credit for, but that’s another topic – they were never able to resolve these issues in practice.  The result was an ongoing pattern of a white-led group wanting to recruit members of color, but not being able to deal with the real-world repercussions of this desire. 

Ray raises the question of false consciousness on the part of people of color who participate in multi-racial organizations.  Few people in STO, and Ignatin least of all, had much use for the concept of false consciousness, although they did utilize a gramscian conception of dual consciousness, in which workers contain within themselves both bourgeois and proletarian worldviews.  This analysis was most often applied to white workers, with the understanding that a proletarian worldview necessarily implied class unity in opposition to the divisiveness of white supremacy.  As Ray correctly infers, STO was plagued by a tendency “to take an uncritical eye towards (specifically) the black radical tradition or black working class politics.”  But this very fact indicates that the group did not ascribe false consciousness to those people of color who opt to work within multiracial organizations.

As to Ray’s last question, regarding STO’s hypothetical response to the perspective offered by James in his discussion with Trotsky, I think the answer is complicated.  Undoubtedly the group would have agreed with the proposition that self-determination includes the option to work within multiracial organizations.  At the same time, especially during its anti-imperialist period, STO did tend to emphasize support for revolutionary nationalist organizations that excluded whites.  (Not all of these groups were simply separatist, however; the Moviemento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), for instance, was a joint Puerto Rican and Mexican revolutionary organization.)  STO did encourage, for example, black or Puerto Rican revolutionaries to consider joining black or Puerto Rican organizations, although membership was open to them if they decided that STO reflected their politics better than any of the available alternatives.  

This probably doesn’t constitute the sort of openness to that Ray was presumably hoping for.  From my own perspective, I think the difficulties STO encountered in dealing with these issues represent one of the more unfortunate aspects of the group’s history, but I don’t have a good answer as to how to do better.  The readily available alternatives – traditional “multi-racial” but white-dominated groups like the RCP, and all-white solidarity outfits like Prairie Fire – both suffer from even bigger problems.  I’d like to hear Ray’s take (or that of others) on how these issues can be better resolved by revolutionaries today.

At the same time, I wanted to alert people to one of the newer items up over at the STO web archive:  the collection called Fascism in the US?, which gives a good sampling of the group’s thinking on fascism and anti-fascism.  In many ways, the pieces in this document help shed light on some of the more interesting developments in anti-fascist theory and practice over the past two decades.  One could argue that STO’s work around developing anti-fascist strategies has had more long term influence on radical activism than anything else the group was involved in during its nearly two-decade history.

One particularly important essay is “Fascism:  Some Common Misperceptions” by Noel Ignatin, which draws some sharp lines about what fascism is and is not (eg. it’s not just a synonym for “very bad” politics).  Even today, this piece, now nearly thirty years old, should be required reading for anyone on the left who wants to talk about fascism and anti-fascism with any degree of clarity.  The following selection, for example, challenges notions of fascism that are still common on the left:

“Suppose, for a moment, a situation where the bourgeoisie was exhausted, divided, unable to command any longer the respect of the population, but where the working class is not sufficiently conscious and organised to rule as a class. Could a mob inflamed by radical slogans without class content come to power and proceed to expropriate the bourgeoisie while retaining the essential feature of bourgeois social relations, namely the domination of the living laborer by previously accumulated, congealed, dead labor? Perhaps "fascist" would not be the best term to apply to such a regime, but would it not exhibit many of the features of the fascist state? How would such a regime stay in power? Most likely, it would combine violent denunciations of the old system of private property, resting on the masses’ bitter memories of private exploitation, with constant appeals for vigilance lest the old way be restored. It would strengthen the state apparatus, and scornfully dismiss appeals for free speech and press as opening the door for the class enemy to return. Lastly, it would mobilize the population by means of a constant and deafening clamor of propaganda, officially approved mass organizations in every sphere of life, public rallies and demonstrations, supervised collective study and character re-molding, perhaps through some device like the Catholic confessional or ritual group discussions of individual errors.”

In 2006, I think it’s safe to say that "the proletariat is not sufficiently conscious and organized to rule as a class" in most of the world, while movements that look much like Ignatin’s description have sprung up on all continents, although they are in power almost nowhere.  But in a context where the left looks for fascism in the white house rather than in insurgent resistance movements, the possibilities outlined by Ignatin are too easily dismissed.

And, while we’re at it, people should check out the blog threewayfight, which was inspired in part by the continuing legacy of STO’s approach to anti-fascism, and which extends many of these insights into the new terrain of the twentifirst century.

“Here is the only important division.  There are those, like myself, who consider that the margins of freedom contained in the contemporary regime are but the sedimented by-products of movements of this type [the “movements of the sixties”] that have been going on for centuries; that without these movements the regime not only would never have produced these freedoms but would have, each time, unrelentingly whittled them down (as is happening now); that, finally, humanity can certainly do better.  And there are those who think – they seldom dare say it, except “on the right”, but their arguments and their reasoning boil down to the same thing – that we live in the finally-found form of a free and just political society (some reforms, of course, remain to be accomplished).  The discussion cannot but stop here, and everybody can make their choices or confirm ones they have already made.”
– “The Movements of the Sixties,” Thesis Eleven, no. 18/19 (1987), page 29.

As I noted in my previous post about anti-imperialism, STO was firmly committed to the revolutionary break, and was always distinguishable from the reformists and reformists-in-training that dominated much of the US left in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  A deliberate disregard for the boundaries between legal and illegal action permeated every period of the group’s existence.  In this sense, STO always located itself on Castoriadis’ side of the “only important division.” 

At the same time, the limits of this binary analysis of the world have become clearer in the two decades since Castoriadis put forward his schematic.  A number of anarchists today (including the many of us who have been influenced by the legacy of STO) have begun to speak of a three way fight, rather than a simple two-part division.  From this perspective, a third political faction, which may or may not be helpfully described as “fascist,” maintains the revolutionary stance advocated by Castoriadis, but their politics are at least as opposed to freedom as are those of the “contemporary regime.”  This is a problem that STO only briefly attempted to address, near the end it its existence, but which has become more pronounced with the emergence of undeniably revolutionary, but also undeniably anti-freedom, groups like Al-Qaeda.  (More soon on anti-fascism, “then and now,” as they say.)