The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 19

"Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America."

--Langston Hughes (1936) 

 

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

“I come from a land whose democracy from the very beginning has been tainted with race prejudice born of slavery, and whose richness has been poured through the narrow channels of greed into the hands of the few. I come to the Second International Writers Congress representing my country, America, but most especially the Negro peoples of America, and the poor peoples of America—because I am both a Negro and poor. And that combination of color and of poverty gives me the right then to speak for the most oppressed group in America, that group that has known so little of American democracy, the fifteen million Negroes who dwell within our borders.

We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism—for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination: in many states of our country Negroes are not permitted to vote or to hold political office. In some sections freedom of movement is greatly hindered, especially if we happen to be sharecroppers on the cotton farms of the South. All over America we know what it is to be refused admittance to schools and colleges, to theatres and concert halls, to hotels and restaurants. We know Jim Crow cars, race riots, lynchings, we know the sorrows of the nine Scottsboro boys, innocent young Negroes imprisoned some six years now for a crime that even the trial judge declared them not guilty of having committed, and for which some of them have not yet come to trial. Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”--July, 1936

― Langston Hughes,Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings (Lawrence Hill, 1973)


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Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives.

Author: Alberto Toscano
Date: March 2021

From: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture(Vol. 23, Issue 1)
Publisher: Purdue University Press

Abstract:

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy--beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements and uprisings of the 1960s and the US state's intensification of its repressive and carceral apparatus. Exploring the theoretical insights generated in the prison writings of George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis, it challenges the widely held belief that the 1970s stood as the nadir of theorisation of fascism, its degradation into mere political insult. Instead, with particular emphasis on Davis's articulation of an incipient or preventive fascism, it investigates the theoretical consequences of the differential experience of fascism across axes of racialisation and reflects on the pertinence of Black radical theories of fascism to our current moment of recombinant White supremacy.

"Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third."

--Toni Morrison, "Racism and Fascism" (1995) (1)

BALDWIN: It's very hard to recognize that the standards which have almost killed you are really mercantile standards. They're based on cotton; they're based on oil; they're based on peanuts; they're based on profits.

GIOVANNI: To this day.

BALDWIN: To this hour.

--James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue (1971)

"Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds."

--Martin Luther King, "Drive to End Slums" (1967)

"Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America."

--Langston Hughes (1936)

In one of his prison letters on fascism, collected in Blood in My Eye, George Jackson offered the following reflection: When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week's labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed (121-122).

Following Jackson, we might ask: what happens to the turns and returns of the theoretical debate over fascism and (neo-)authoritarianism when it undergoes a Gestalt shift and takes racial capitalism and its carceral apparatus as its fulcrum, in something like a "tilt shot angled from below" capable of disclosing "a panorama of violence endured" (Sartre 244)? As Jacques Derrida intimated in an unsent letter to Jean Genet, dated one day prior to Jackson's assassination by a guard sniper in San Quentin: "In a prison--this one and others--where it thought it had put its outside in chains, the system of (Western-white-capitalist-racist) society has made possible, by this act, the analysis of its functioning, a practical analysis that is at once the most implacable, the most desperate, but also the most affirmative" (43). (2)

It has become commonplace in the incessant academic metacommentary on theories of fascism to castigate the 1970s as a kind of cognitive nadir, when fascism was degraded from a category of historical analysis and taxonomy into a one-size-fits-all political insult. In what follows, I want to take the imprudent wager that there is virtue and insight in the seeming exaggeration or inflation of fascism in the context of 70s radicalism, but especially to underscore how viewing fascism through the prism of the Black radical tradition can redirect our contemporary debate in fruitful and important ways. I will draw on the experience of Black political prisoners in the US as my point of departure. What happens to our conceptions of fascism and authoritarianism if we take our bearings not from putative analogies with the European interwar scene, but, for instance, from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the "concrete and steel," from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression? I want to probe the analytical nexus of fascism and racial capitalism forged in the liberation struggles of the 1970s, whilst threading it back to the analysis of fascism emerging from Black theorists in the interwar period and forward to the afterlives of fascism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In their writing and correspondence, which is marked by differences of interpretation interwoven with a profound comradeship, both Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson identified the US state as the site for a re-emergence or indeed a perfecting of certain features of (European) historical fascisms. Much of their theorising is suffused by contemporary debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson's case, by an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. Of particular note and relevance for contemporary concerns is the specific light that the prism of race--of racial domination and racial capitalism--sheds on the nexus of fascism and democracy, the way it interrogates and displaces the normative conviction regarding the absolute antithesis between fascist rule and liberal democracy. Jackson and Davis are profoundly aware of the disanalogies of present forms of domination with historical fascism, but they both affirm the epistemologically privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror. In distinct ways, they can be seen to relay and recode that foundational gesture of anti-racist and Black radical anti-fascism crystallised in Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism. As the Martinican poet and politician recounted: "And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss" (Cesaire 36).

But the new, American fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the "other scene" of colonial violence, it originates from liberal democracy itself. The prisons are already full. And rather than a boomerang, the generalisation of racialised carceral terror into the socius at large--which is one of the foremost ingredients of the new fascism--is a much less dramatic or sudden process of seepage, the permeation of the social space of actually-existing liberal democracy with models and devices invented, refined and discussed amid "concrete and steel." As Mullen and Vials put it: for people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy's system of rights, the word 'fascism' does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order. (3)

Or, as Jean Genet had observed on 1 May 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale: "Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That's because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime" (Genet 38). (4)

Like Davis, Jackson also stresses the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, profoundly inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Whence the limits of models, analogies or ideal types. He comments on the "the defects of trying to analyse a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past" (Jackson, Blood 124), and further notes how historically, it "developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation" (125). Now, while for Jackson fascism is profoundly linked to a restructuring of the capitalist state, it is also fundamentally a counter-revolutionary form, revealed by the violence with which it represses anything that poses a consequential threat to that state. It is nevertheless instructive to note that, echoing Nicos Poulantzas's analysis in Fascism and Dictatorship, for Jackson fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counter-revolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist Left. The "opposition of a weak socialist revolution" (Jackson, Blood) is a shared feature among the various fascisms (and one can of course sense the indictment of the contemporary Left in Jackson's historical allusion). In a nutshell then: "Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried--a consciousness that was compromised" (Jackson, Blood 126). Viewed from the US vantage point, that compromise is necessarily entangled with the persistent pattern of the racialization of class that defines American history ever since the white-supremacist counter-revolution against "Black Reconstruction," or indeed ever since Bacon's Rebellion and the concomitant "invention of the white race" (in Theodore W. Allen's formulation). As Jackson quips: "Marx's definition of history as a broken, twisted, sordid spectrum of class struggles is substantiated by Amerikan labor history" (148).

In Angela Y. Davis's concurrent analysis, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism is both further refined and shifted. Fascism in the US was a kind of perfected form for Jackson--all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared: "Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange" (Blood 158). (5) Notwithstanding the national and conjunctural mutability of fascism, Jackson provocatively claimed that (economic) reform could be identified as "a working definition of fascist motive forces," and one that was particularly apt for the political manifestations of US monopoly capital. For Davis, fascism in the US of the early 1970s took instead what was best defined as a preventive and incipient form. The terminology was borrowed and adapted from her teacher Herbert Marcuse. In a 1970 interview with Hans Magnus Enzensberger for the latter's journal Kursbuch, entitled "USA: Questions of Organization and the Revolutionary Subject," Marcuse had proposed to invert the customary political sequence that would see fascism as reactive not just in social content but in temporal form--whether responding immediately to a potentially triumphant revolutionary upsurge, or, in a mediated way, to an already defeated or ebbing challenge to capitalism. It is not reaction but anticipation that animates this new figure of fascism. As Marcuse tells Enzensberger: "I believe that there is something like preventative fascism. In the last ten to twenty years we've experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn't stand on the agenda at the moment. In the same way preventative fascism comes about" (Marcuse, "USA" 138).

The question of the possibility of fascism in the US, much debated by liberation movements and the far Left throughout the 70s, is for Marcuse deeply entangled with the concrete forms taken by preventative counterrevolution as a core strategic imperative of the capitalist order. The specificity of this anticipatory logic is also closely linked to the distinctive disanalogies between this "incipient fascism" and its interwar European precursors: The question is whether fascism is taking over in the United States. If by that we understand the gradual or rapid abolition of the remnants of the constitutional state, the organization of paramilitary troops such as the Minutemen, and granting the police extraordinary legal powers such as the notorious no-knock law which does away with the inviolability of the home; if one looks at the court decisions of recent years; if one knows that special troops--so-called counterinsurgency corps--are being trained in the United States for possible civil war; if one looks at the almost direct censorship of the press, television and radio: then, as far as I'm concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient fascism.... American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support. (137-138) (6)

Fascism here defines a set of repressive tactics, as well as an encompassing political and ideological process, which differentially targets racialised and subaltern populations whose very existence and sociality is increasingly perceived as a threat--whence the porous borders between the "criminal" and the "political prisoner." It is a process in which, to borrow from Jackson's characterization of the "oppressive contract" underlying US capitalism: "Accrual of contempt [for the oppressed] is [a] fundamental survival technique" (Jackson, Blood 162).

Davis develops the Marcusean thesis that "fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society" (Davis & Aptheker, "Preface" xiv), (7) to specify that transformation from the vantage point of the lived experience of racialised communities in the US--where the most threatening feature of Black revolutionary politics for the state takes the form not so much of the armed struggle imagined by Jackson but of the "survival programs," the enclaves of autonomous social reproduction practiced by the Black Panthers and other groups. What can be gleaned from Davis's account more broadly is the differential visibility and experience of both fascism and democracy. In this regard, it can help to attune us to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can also determine the modality in which fascism is lived. (8) There is a kind of everyday fascism, so to speak, that marks the interaction of people of colour with the state, and which, while acting as the repressive infrastructure of a liberal democracy still steeped in the legacies of white supremacy, also signals the possibility or tendency to generalise this incipient or preventive fascism to the population at large. As Davis puts it, fascism today is "primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent-revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats" (Davis, "Political" 41). But the latter are, alas, unlikely fully to perceive this phenomenon, both because of the invisibilisation of its site--its carceral space with its "totalitarian aspirations" (44)--and the dilated character of its unfolding, its time. The kind of fascism diagnosed by Davis is a "protracted social process" (Davis & Aptheker, "Preface" xv), whose "growth and development are cancerous in nature" (Davis, "Political" 41). We thus have the correlation in Davis's analysis between, on the one hand, the prison as a racialised enclave or laboratory and, on the other, the fascistic strategy and tactics of counter-revolution, which are in turn understood in terms of a molecular social process. Both spatially and temporally, the perception of fascist realities and potentialities is occluded by its carceral frame. As Davis will later write: "The dangerous and indeed fascistic trend toward progressively greater numbers of hidden, incarcerated human populations is itself rendered invisible. All that matters is the elimination of crime--and you get rid of crime by getting rid of people who, according to the prevailing racial common sense, are the most likely people to whom criminal acts will be attributed (Davis, "Race" 63). (9)

Dylan Rodriguez has powerfully captured the originality and challenge of the "fascism problematic" that Davis and Jackson forged out of the political violence of confinement. Notwithstanding their partially divergent evaluations, in naming a fascist present in the US (be it emergent or consummated), they share in "a theoretical and symbolic political gesture that fosters an epistemological break from the common sense of U.S. white supremacy and the regime of state violence on which it is premised" (117). This gesture is twofold. On the one hand, it anchors racial, carceral and counter-insurgent violence in political economy--not just by identifying the instrumentality of brutality and repression to the reproduction of class relations but by amplifying the Fanonian insight that we should consider violence "as a primary and productive (rather than merely repressive) articulation of particular social formations" (130). On the other hand, the reformulation of the fascist problematic from the vantage point of racialised political incarceration has the lasting virtue of troubling the facile if ideologically vital opposition between fascism and (liberal) democracy. As Rodriguez pointedly asks: "how might our political understanding of the United States be altered or dismantled if we were to conceptualize fascism as the restoration of a liberal hegemony, a way out of crisis, rather than as the symptom of crisis or the breakdown of 'democracy' and 'civil society' (137)?" As ever, rearticulating the analysis and aetiology of fascism also inflects the strategic imaginary of anti-fascism: "The dynamic, strategic relations of violence condensing within the American social formation at different times and in different places are neither accidental nor excessive, and the challenge of this reconceptualized fascism problematic is to comprehend the socially reproductive capacities of coercive technologies and (proto)genocidal practice within the current order" (140-141).

What relation might we trace between the fascism problematic differentially articulated by Jackson and Davis, on the one hand, and earlier theorisations of fascism by black radical intellectuals, on the other? In a 1990 lecture that was only recently published, Cedric J. Robinson advanced the proposition that chronic neglect of autonomous traditions of Black radical theorising has impeded engagement with a "Black construction of fascism" that is alternative, indeed antithetical, to a "euphonious recital of fascism" in mainstream theorization of the phenomenon (Robinson, "Fascism" 149). (10) Drawing on Hayden White's critical anatomy of Western historiography, Robinson surveys the platitudes and incoherencies of contemporary academic analyses of fascism to reveal a founding conceit or forgery, namely "the historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist," the dark side of Western civilisation--in an "exemplary narrative" where the fascist nemesis confirms the essential superiority of Western liberalism, confirming "the existence of the epistemic West" and the "philosophic identity between Western civilization, Western culture, and human destiny" (152). Conversely, from the perspective of non-Western peoples and black radical movements, as Cesaire had crystallised in his Discourse, fascism, "was no more an historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade, and slavery. Fascism was and is a modern social discipline [of domination] which much like its genetic predecessors, Christianity, imperialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism, provided the means for the ascent to and preservation of power for elitists" (Robinson, "Fascism").

But, in keeping with the argument articulated in Black Marxism regarding the autonomy of a black radical tradition from Marxist theory, Robinson is compelled to argue that most Black radical theorists of fascism (including C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and to an extent even Oliver Cromwell Cox) remained captive to the "Euro-Marxist construction of fascism" (11) ("Fascism" 155) that subordinates the civilizational and racializing continuities between Western colonialism and fascism to economic determinism and class consciousness. The signal exception to this, for Robinson, was W.E.B. Du Bois, who affirmed "the cultural identity between fascism and the putative democracies" (156), anticipating Cesaire in his assertion that "the precondition for fascism was a civilization profoundly traumatized by slavery and racism" (157). (12) Yet there is something both intriguing and symptomatic about Robinson's concluding reflection about the fact that Du Bois's most forceful and resonant account of the continuity between the history of white racism and fascism "paradoxically ... coincided with that moment when Du Bois was most influenced by Marxism" ("Fascism"). Was this really a paradox? Du Bois's own account two decades earlier of the "African roots" of World War 1 had established a nexus between capitalist imperialism and racist oppression remarkably consonant with Lenin's contemporaneous treatment of imperialism; (13) similarly, the pioneering account of autonomous black agency (the slaves' "general strike") and insight into the capitalist infrastructure of racism in Black Reconstruction in America amply demonstrate that grasping the racial and capitalist origins of the West's disciplines of domination was an abiding concern for Du Bois. To say, with the latter, that "the essence of fascism was racial" is thus only persuasive as long as this is not in opposition to the notion that the essence of fascism was "also" capitalist. (14) In other words, it is only if "racial capitalism" is not reduced to a cultural or civilizational determinant of that massive if spectral discursive entity that is "the West" that it can be articulated to the new phenomenologies of fascism that the likes of Jackson and Davis sought to explore--in ways that did not sunder insurgent black movements and Marxist theories, however "stretched."

The recovery of 1970s debates so often stigmatised for their exaggerations is not here an argument for a simple return to the fascist problematic forged by Black political prisoners and theorists. Notwithstanding the tenacious link between incarceration, racism and capitalist power, historical disanalogies remain evident, not least in the fact that contemporary authoritarianism is, alas, not best approached in terms of its prevention of or reaction to revolutionary trends (though we could certainly see it as a response to reformist ones). It also does not harm to recall Stuart Hall's warning, in presenting his analyses of Thatcherism and authoritarian statism, about the problematic pleasures of a certain antifascism: There is a sense in which the appearance of organized Fascism on the political stage seems to solve everything for the Left. It confirms our best-worst suspicions, awakening familiar ghosts and spectres. Fascism and economic recession together seem to render transparent those connections which most of the time are opaque, hidden and displaced. Away with all those time-wasting theoretical speculations! ... What we have to explain is a move toward 'authoritarian populism'--an exceptional form of the capitalist state--which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent. (15)

Visible fascists can distract us from more enduring and regressive transformations, Hall suggests, while their absence can also serve to minimise profoundly violent and "fascistic" mutations in the state that may be invisible to the self-designated majority while being visited on the most vulnerable, as Davis intimates. But are we to remain stuck, when thinking our present, in an alternative between two positions, both seemingly compatible with the persistence of liberal-democratic institutions, however distorted and corrupted? On the one hand, fascists without fascism (the UK in the late 1970s according to Hall), on the other, fascism without fascists (which could be a way of defining the US in the 1970s, from the vantage point of its Black political prisoners). Perhaps to bridge this antinomy we need to reflect on the connection between the forms of "incipient fascism" identified by Davis--in the specific US case the normalisation of forms of terror and extreme repression against racialised and subaltern populations--and the emergence of explicitly fascistic movements and ideologies; to think about the mediations between the extreme levels of classed and racialised violence that accompany actually-existing liberal democracies (think, for instance, of the so-called "migration crisis") and the emergence of movements and ideologies which paradoxically argue that state and culture have been occupied by the Left, that racism is now meted out against formerly dominant ethno-national majorities, and that deracinated elites have conspired with the wretched of the earth to destroy properly "national" populations who can only be rescued by a revanchist politics of security and protectionism.

In an essay written in the wake of the 1992 L.A. uprising, Ruth Wilson Gilmore presciently bridged the black radical theories of fascism forged amid the crushed revolutions of the 60s and 1970s with the analysis of the mutations of racial capitalism in the age of so-called neoliberalism. Combining Robinson's internationalism with Jackson and Davis's insistence on the analysis of capital, Gilmore argued that reckoning with the terror waged by the US "crisis state" demands thinking its articulation with a geoeconomic order in which the United States was losing hegemony and the capacity for a pacifying redistribution of imperial dividends. Continuing in the tradition of Du Bois's historical audit of the "psychological wages of whiteness," Gilmore mediates the revanchist white supremacist ideologies crystallised around the trial of the LAPD officers who brutalised Rodney King and the impasse experienced by US imperialism and capitalist hegemony. (15) White nationalism here appears as a crisis ideology, which is also to say a revanchist victimology haunted by demotion and loss, "the idea and enactment of winning, of explicit domination set against the local reality of decreasing family wealth, fear of unemployment, threat of homelessness, and increased likelihood of early, painful death from capitalism's many toxicities" (Gilmore, "Austerity" 27). Racial ideologies do political economic work, as civilisational narratives fuelled by ressentiment find outlets in policy platforms, exploiting "the need for an enemy whose threat obliges endless budgetary consideration"--as writ large in the ensuing trajectory of mass incarceration (30). (16) At levels which are at once affective, ideological, political-economic, and international, incipient fascism returns here as the negative horizon of an anti-capitalist politics of liberation or abolition set against racial capitalism and its authoritarian investments. As Gilmore noted, in terms that continue to resonate with the present: "the very crisis which we must exploit--the raw materials of profound social change--is the tending toward fascism through the romance of identity, forged in the always already of the American national project. Our work is to rearticulate our own connections in new (and frightening) forward-looking moves in order to describe, promote, organize, bargain in the political arenas" ("Austerity" 30).

As already occurred in past conjunctures in US history (Woodrow Wilson/the Klan/Birth of a Nation in the 1910s; George Wallace/Richard Nixon/the "Southern Strategy"/"Law and Order" in the late 1960s-early 1970s; Reagan and a far right surge in the early 1980s), the contemporary moment has witnessed the sinister connubium between mainstream neo-authoritarianism, on the one hand, and white nationalist or neo-fascist street and ideological movements, on the other--with the latter often functioning as incubator or intercessor for the former. (17) In attending to the recombinant and plural character of contemporary authoritarian politics it is worth reminding ourselves of some methodological lessons from prior militant inquiries into fascism, racism and the state. Especially pertinent to our moment is Poulantzas's warning not to expect ideological cohesion or univocity from fascist ideologies. On the contrary, what the Greek Marxist theorist termed the "popular impact" of fascism stemmed from its ability to modulate its discourse in order to enlist and energise different class fractions, thereby capturing, diverting and corrupting popular aspirations (Poulantzas 265). Or, as the playwright David Edgar observed in his brief anatomy of British fascism: "the very contradictions of the doctrine, and their irrational resolution, are at the core of its functional effectiveness as a mobilizer of support" (Edgar, "Racism" 112). (18) Now, whereas Poulantzas was analysing a historical fascism deliberately playing across class registers, the contemporary ecology of the authoritarian right--including in the multiplicity of its vectors of communication--can be seen to replicate fascism's "pluralism" in a less centralised form, allowing tactical and strategic convergences between authoritarian imaginaries that might seem incompatible "on paper." Approached from such a perspective, which highlights the composite character of fascism as a crisis ideology that accrues efficacy by dint of its contradictory character (which is not the weakness a rationalist left may take it to be), the presence within contemporary authoritarianism of neoliberal rationalities together with (racialized) nostalgia for the "working class" or aversions to "globalism" is less of an enigma than it might otherwise be.

Poulantzas's insight on fascism's discursive pluralism can be critically enhanced by attending to Black radical perspectives on fascism and authoritarianism, which force us to articulate, to think together what mainstream critical theory often compartmentalises. Thus, for instance, to treat racist authoritarian populisms primarily as "effects of neoliberal reason--its expansion of the domain and claim of the private for persons and corporations alike, and its rejection of political and social (as opposed to market) justice" (Brown 21), is to sever actually-existing neoliberalism from its imbrication with the changing imperatives of racial capitalism and the reconfigurations of the racial state into an "anti-state state." (19) To say that the "energies of aggrieved power" coalescing into contemporary neo-authoritarian and white nationalist ideologies "remained on the political fringe until recent years," namely until "a liberal or social democratic order" was sapped by neoliberal reason (22), is to imply a periodisation that would be largely unrecognisable to the Black radical theorists and movements explored above. First--and without discounting the way in which dimensions of liberalism or social democracy were shaped by Black struggles, at the same time as they were also constituted by hierarchies of difference--racist ideologies and practices were never on the "fringe," witness the fact that fascism became an object of intense theorising and signification in radical Black (as well as Asian and Latino) movements in the US in what is now retrospectively imagined as the heyday of liberalism. Second, the political emergence of neoliberalism as a discourse of state managers (rather than of an insurgent intellectual elite) under Reagan and Thatcher was profoundly if insidiously racialized from the start, and deeply shaped by the "law and order" agendas that developed in explicit antagonism to the radical insurgencies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. (20)

The Black radical perspectives on authoritarian politics briefly explored in this article can contribute to overcoming the methodological conceit that leads us to project typology onto history, treating "liberalism," "social democracy," "neoliberalism" or indeed "fascism" itself as political orders that can be exhaustively defined and recognized as operative in particular spaces and times. They can also contribute to breaking the repetition compulsion that underlies the debate on whether the present can be captured critically by analogy or comparison with (European interwar) fascism. (21) What happens if we recall Langston Hughes's suggestion that the fascism of the 1930s was a "new name" for a racial terror familiar to Black, as well as indigenous and colonized, peoples? What if the defamiliarizing "tilt shot" that such perspectives enact forces us to recognize that the political order is not "one," that, for instance, the US has at various points been "experienced as something uncannily similar [to fascism] by people of color living outside of its system of rights" (Vials, Hitler 165)? Fully assuming the differential, situated experience of authoritarian political orders and ideologies is the premise of a critical, reflective antiauthoritarian politics, one that confronts head-on the material blockages to coalitional possibilities, recalling George Jackson's incisive warning that "fascism takes any latent divisible forces and develops them into divisions in fact" (Soledad 237). (22) Indeed, it was precisely a coalitional horizon that led the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Young Lords, the Asian-American Political Alliance and others in the late 1960s and early 1970s to turn to the organizing discourse of anti-fascism (Vials, Hitler 161 192). If one of the hallmarks of fascism as an inter-classist politics of domination--what I have termed its "pluralism" --is the cynical amalgam of contradictory aspirations, a fatuous fusion of differences, then a creative appropriation of anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian traditions today will perforce require working through the realization that domination is not homogeneously experienced because it is not homogeneously exercised. It is on this background too that we may work politically to rearticulate our connections. 

Works Cited:


Brown, Wendy. "Neoliberalism's Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century 'Democracies.'" Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, edited by Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, Max Pensky, U of Chicago P, 2018, pp. 7-43.

Burley, Shane. "The Autumn of the Alt Right." Commune, 21 February 2020, https://communemag.com/the-autumnof-the-alt-right/.

Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham, introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley, Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Cleaver, Kathleen. "Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder." The Black Panther, vol. II, no. 6, 14 September 1968, p. 8.

Davis, Angela Y. "Interview with Angela Y. Davis." Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, Verso, 2020, pp. 203-16.

--"Oppression and Repression in the US." lecture on 17 November 1972 at California State University, Fullerton. https://calisphere.org/item/8cef4824d3eb83e821b886c4c3f9e15b/

--"Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation." If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. New edition, edited by Angela Y. Davis, Verso, 2016 [1971], pp. 27-43.

--. "Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry." The Angela Y. Davis Reader, edited by Joy James, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, pp. 61-73.

--. & Aptheker, Bettina. "Preface." If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. New edition, edited by Angela Y. Davis, Verso, 2016 [1971], pp. xiii-xviii.

Derrida, Jacques. "Letter to Jean Genet (fragments)." Negotiations. Translated and edited by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford UP, 2002, p. 43.

Edgar, David. "Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front." Race & Class, vol. XIX, no. 2, 1977, pp. 111-31.

--. "The International Face of Fascism." Speech at the National Anti-Klan Network Conference, Atlanta, 19 June 1982, Urgent Tasks, no. 14, 1982, p. 4.

Ferguson, Roderick. "We Cannot Be the Same After the Siege." Allies (Boston Review Forum 12), edited by Ed Pavlic et al, Boston Review, 2019.

Frost, Jackqueline. "Jean Genet's May Day Speech, 1970: 'Your Real Life Depends on the Black Panther Party.'" Social Text online, 1 May 2020, https://socialtextjournal.org/jean-genets-may-day-speech-1970-your-real-life-depends-on-the-black-panther-party/

Genet, Jean. "May Day Speech." The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, translated by Jeff Fort, edited by Albert Dichy, Stanford UP, 2004, pp. 34-41.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence." The Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Verso, 2017, pp. 225-40.

--. "Prisons and Class Warfare." interview with Clement Petitjean/Periode, Historical Materialism, 2018, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/interviews/prisons-and-class-warfare

--. "Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism." Race and Class, vol. 40, no. 2-3, 1998, pp. 171-187.

--. "Race, Prisons and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence." Socialist Register 2009: Violence Today, Merlin, 2009.

--. "Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater." Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, Routledge, 1993, pp. 23-37.

Hayden, Michael Edison. "Stephen Miller's Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails." Southern Poverty Law Center, 12 November 2019, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails

Hall, Stuart. "The Great Moving Right Show." Marxism Today, January 1979, pp. 14-20.

Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye. Penguin, 1975 [1972].

--. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Lawrence Hill Books, 1994 [1970]. Kelley, Robin D.G. "A Poetics of Anticolonialism." Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, pp. 20-21.

--. "Foreword." No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements, edited by Hilary Moore and James Tracey, City Lights, 2020, pp. 11-20

--. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Beacon Press, 2002, pp. 55-57.

Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, The U of North Carolina P, 2011, pp. 12-15.

Lawrence, Ken. "The Ku Klux Klan and Fascism (1982)." Vials and Mullen, pp. 289-299

Marcuse, Herbert. "Le Monde Diplomatique." [1976], Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 6, edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Routledge, 2014, pp. 358-61.

--. "USA: Questions of Organization and the Revolutionary Subject." The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3, edited by Douglas Kellner, Routledge, 2005, pp. 137-41.

Poulantzas, Nicos. "On the Popular Impact of Fascism." The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State, edited by James Martin, Verso, 2008, p. 265.

Rasmussen Mikkel Bolt. "Yes Of Course ... Derrida to Genet on Commitment in Favor of Jackson." New Formations, vol. 75, 2012, pp. 140-153.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. The U of North Carolina P, 2000 [1983].

--. "Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists." Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance, edited by H.L.T. Quan, Pluto, 2019, pp. 149-59.

Rodriguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. U of Minnesota P, 2006.

Saba, Paul. "Fighting Fascism and the Ku Klux Klan." Viewpoint Magazine, 10 October 2017, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/10/10/fighting-fascism-ku-klux-klan-lessons-new-communistmovement/

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "A Plea for Intellectuals." Between Existentialism and Marxism, Basic Books, 1974, pp. 228-285.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. "The Afterlife of Fascism." South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 105, no. 1, 2006, pp. 71-93.

Slobodian, Quinn. "Anti-'68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right." Cultural Politics, vol.15, no. 3, 2019, pp. 372-86.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. "Normalizing Nationalism." Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, Beacon Press, 2019, pp. 111-128.

Toscano, Alberto. "'America's Belgium': W.E.B. Du Bois on Class, Race, and the Origins of World War I." Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, edited by Alexander Anievas, Brill, 2014, pp. 236-57.

Vials, Christopher. Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States. U of Massachusetts P, 2014.

--. & Bill V. Mullen, editors. The US Antifascism Reader. Verso, 2020. Williams, Tyler M. "Derrida and the Censorship of Literature." The New Centennial Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-22.

Author's profile:

 

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory, Dept of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently Visiting Faculty at the Digital Democracies Institute, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2nd edn, Verso, 2017) and, most recently, of the introduction to the new edition of Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman's Prophets of Deceit (Verso, 2021). He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism and editor of the Italian List for Seagull Books. Email: <alberto.toscano77@gmail.com>

(1) On Toni Morrison's reflections on fascism, see Ferguson ("Siege").

(2) This was the first publication of the letter in any language. On Derrida's reply to Genet, see Rasmussen and Williams (1-22).

(3) Vials & Mullen (271), editorial introduction to Penny Nakatsu's speech at the United Front against Fascism Conference, July 1969. See also the discussion of the "spatial metaphor" of fascism, understood as expanding out of racialized spaces of subalternity, abjection or second-class citizenship, in Vials (Hitler 159-193), Chapter 6: "United Front Against Genocide: African American Antifascism, the Black Panthers, and the Multiracial Coalitions of the Late 1960s."

(4) On this speech and Genet's relation to the Panthers, see Frost.

(5) See also Cleaver (8).

(6) The question of the new modalities of fascism is a leitmotiv in the writings from Marcuse's last decade, which sees him sometimes stressing, as in this passage, the objective possibility of a new fascism, and at others soberly noting the limited if real freedoms that residually survive in liberal capitalist democracies. A particularly striking formulation of the problem, with special reference to the US, is provided in a short piece written by Marcuse at the request of Le Monde diplomatique on the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. There, Marcuse concludes his reflections as follows: "Today, the initiative is with the other side: totalization of controls. A new social system may well be in the making: a neo- or semi-fascist regime on a broad popular basis. There are signs pointing in this direction: the narrowing of the possibilities of capital expansion, the growth of the dependent population, the alliance of Mafia and legitimate business, the spread of violence, continued racism, the concentration of the weapons of annihilation in the hands of the powers that be, the pervasive corruption of the democratic process. Against the specter of a fascism American-style, the Left is waging an uphill fight: divided in itself, without effective organization. Its main weapon is still political education--countereducation--in theory and practice: the slow painful process of making people aware of the fact that the repressions required for maintaining the established society are no longer necessary, that they can be abolished without being replaced by another system of domination" ("Diplomatique" 360).

(7) See also Davis ("Political" 37); as well as the extensive discussion of the nexus of racism and incipient fascism in the US (with special focus on both its judicial dimensions and the racist nature of the Vietnam war) in Davis ("Oppression and Repression").

(8) Half a century on, Davis insists on the relevance of the category of fascism, and its character as a reaction to Black liberation struggles: "The outcome of the US presidential elections in 2016 would have been different if not for tendencies that are, unfortunately, best described as "fascist." ... Fascist tendencies that have become apparent today have been produced from within the liberal democracies of Europe and the Americas. As I have said, the structural racism that has characterized the United States since the very beginning of its history has been one of the primary internal contradictions to democracy. On the other hand, every moment of considerable progress, where democracy is concerned, has emanated from Black people's struggles against racism. Political forces of conservatism and reaction have always relied on racism and, as has been evident in the recent period, the ultranationalism represented by the current president is anchored in a fascist notion of the nation that calls for exclusionary strategies that are racist and Islamophobia" ("Interview" 209-10). Davis's reference in her recent discussion of fascism remains Marcuse, in particular his 1934 essay "The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State."

(9) Cited in Rodriguez (141).

(10) This essay is a pendant to Robinson's earlier excavation of the autonomy of black anti-fascist movements in the context of mobilizations around the invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy, see Robinson ("Fascism" 87-109). Robinson's conclusions to his historical investigation are worth quoting: "For many if not most Blacks, the historical significance of fascism was clear: at home it foreshadowed the descent of liberalism and even the faint suggestion of racial tolerance; elsewhere it meant the destruction of even the symbols of racial liberation. Stung by the co-option of much of their leadership in the business of domination and exploitation, and effectively abandoned by the Left and the enlightened faction of American capital, they withdrew to their own council. With an immediacy which can only be understood as the result of immanent political consciousness and tradition, they mobilized to resist Fascism. The number and variety of their responses so quickly mobilized on three continents provide evidence of their historical consciousness" (106).

(11) For a judicious and sympathetic criticism of Robinson's efforts to make the Black radical tradition incongruent with Marxist theory, see Makalani (12-15).

(12) On the affinities between Cesaire's discourse and Robinson's reflections on black anti-fascism, see Kelley ("Anticolonialism" 20-21). See also Kelley (Imagination 55-57). See also the illuminating exploration of the historical nexus between the "preventive wars" waged by US imperialism and the fascist potentialities inherent to settler-colonialism and slavery in Singh. Singh writes: "Poet Langston Hughes once described the casualties of U.S. expansion, slavery, and segregation as the victims of 'our native fascisms'; as careful scholars affirmed, fascism was largely a deviation of democratic regimes. Thus, while democratic liberalism continually reimagines fascism as its monstrous Other, fascism might be better understood as its doppelganger or double--an exclusionary will to power that has regularly re-emerged, manifesting itself in: (1) those zones of internal exclusion within liberal-democratic societies (plantations, reservations, ghettos, and prisons); and (2) those sites where liberalism's expansionist impulse and universalizing force has been able to evade its own 'constitutional restraints' (the frontier, the colony, the state of emergency, the occupation, and the counterinsurgency)" (79).

(13) See my "'America's Belgium: W.E.B. Du Bois on Class, Race, and the Origins of World War I.'"

(14) Robinson's passing account of fascism in Black Marxism is more effective in mediating class rule and racial ideology than his essay on Black theorists of fascism. As he writes: "the marshaling of national social forces (peasants, farmers, workers, clerics, professional classes, the aristocracy, and the state) was accomplished by the ideological phantasmagoria of race, Herrenvolk, and nationalism. This compost of violence, in its time, became known under the name of fascism. With the creation of fascism, the bourgeoisie retained the full range of its social, political, and economic prerogatives. It had the cake of the total control of its national society, an efficient instrument for expanding its domination and expropriation to the Third World, and the ultimate means for redressing the injuries and humiliations of the past. Again, not unexpectedly, slavery as a form of labor would reappear in Europe." See Robinson (Tradition 20-21).

(15) It is worth noting that the 1970s and early 1980s saw the surge of the "Third Klan" and a confluence between traditional vehicles for white supremacy and various neo-Nazi formations, which in turn shaped Black radical and far Left anti-fascist practice and theory. See Kelley ("Foreword"). For the ways that this conjuncture shaped the theorizing of fascism in the anti-racist and new communist Left, see Lawrence (289-299) and Saba.

(16) See especially Gilmore ("Keynesianism" 171-187); Gilmore ("Violence"); Gilmore ("Prisons").


(17) As Burley observes: "A decline of the Alt Right is not a decline in the threat of fascism, in fact, it could simply be momentary projection of what is to come. Now is the time to watch for how the Alt Right will try to refashion itself, how its leadership class will adapt to new conditions. But of greater concern still is the way white nationalism informs and will inform the state, and how it responds to migration in a global crisis of climate catastrophe and economic collapse. The Alt Right gave the state extra license to resort to racist violence as a solution to its problems, and just as in fascist movements past the state found the relationship with extra-state groups synergistic." For a forensic chronicle of how white nationalism embedded itself into the executive branch under Trump, see Hayden. See also Stern.

(18) For Edgar, however, it remained vital in the late 1970s and early 1980s to distinguish, politically and analytically, between neo-fascist movements and the racist state. As he argued, after 1979 (the date of the defeat of the National Front in the UK elections that brought Thatcher to power), "practically, politically, and sociologically the fascist right was an exclusive, excluded phenomenon, that ... had to be considered and fought separately from the racist machine of the state"--though he did not exclude echoes of the former in the latter. See David Edgar ("Fascism" 4).


(19) "One of the results of contemporary racial capitalism's relentlessly restructured state-institutional capacities, and the discourses and practices that combine to enliven them, is 'the anti-state state'--governmental capacity dominated by mainstream parties and policies that achieve power on the platform that states are bad and should shrink" Gilmore ("Abolition" 235).

(20) It is also worth noting that within intellectual neoliberal collectives themselves explicitly authoritarian and racist currents were also active. Tracing these currents, it becomes possible to see how "right-populist thought as not so much a backlash against neoliberalism but the realization of possibilities latent within it" (Slobodian 374).

(21) For a recent, perspicuous example of this genre, see Samuel Moyn, "The Trouble with Comparisons." NYR Daily, 19 May 2020, available at: https://www.nvbooks.com/dailv/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/. What we have tried to sketch out here is precisely the non-comparative character of black radical theories of fascism.

(22) On fascism as an apparatus of division, see also Davis ("Oppression and Repression in the US.")

by Alberto Toscano
Goldsmiths, University of London
 

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Purdue University Press
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/

Source Citation

Toscano, Alberto. "Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, Mar. 2021, p. NA. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A664550456/LitRC?u=sfpl_main&sid=googleScholar&xid=cff06118. Accessed 11 Mar. 2024.

 

The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 17

 

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/.../httpbostonrevie…

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on December 7, 2020):

Monday, December 7, 2020

Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley On The Real Meaning of the 2020 National Presidential Election and the Profound Intellectual and Political Legacy of Dr. Cedric Robinson (1940-2016)

 

DR. CEDRIC J. ROBINSON (1940-2016)

 

 

https://bostonreview.net/.../robin-d-g-kelley-births-nation/

Politics
Race

Births of a Nation, Redux

Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson

by Robin D. G. Kelley
November 5, 2020
Boston Review

IMAGE: A promotional poster for the film 'Birth of a Nation' (1915)

I wrote the following essay, “Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson,” in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, but it could have been written today—two days into a still unsettled presidential election; two days of witnessing frenzied, nail-biting, soul-searching Democrats wondering what happened to the blue wave and why 68 million people actually voted for Trump; two days of threats from the White House that they will fight in the courts and in the streets before giving up power. And today Cedric Robinson, pioneering scholar of what he called the “Black Radical Tradition,” would have celebrated his eightieth birthday.

Today Cedric Robinson would have celebrated his eightieth birthday. What Robinson identified as “the rewhitening of America” a century ago is what we’re seeing play out today.

The lessons I took from Cedric in the aftermath of Trump’s election still stand: our problem is not polling, or the failure of Democrats to mobilize the Black and Latinx vote (they came out, often at great risk to their health and safety), or a botched effort to reach working-class whites with a strong, colorblind class-based agenda. What Robinson identified as “the rewhitening of America” a century ago is what we’re seeing play out today.

But before reviving the tired race-versus-class debate, pay attention: Robinson was making an argument about racial regimes as expressions of class power and how racism undergirds class oppression. As I quoted Robinson before: “White patrimony deceived some of the majority of Americans, patriotism and nationalism others, but the more fugitive reality was the theft they themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others they facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation of Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a paltry dividend, but it still serves.” (The emphasis is mine.)

What we’ve seen is the consolidation of a racial regime based—as are all racial regimes—on “fictions” “masquerading as memory and the immutable.” Trump is saving white suburban women from Black rapists and drug dealers who want to take their Section 8 vouchers out to gated communities. He’s protecting our borders from “illegals” who have no claims whatsoever to this white man’s country. He’s shielding the nation from wicked critical race theorists and Howard Zinn with “patriotic education.” He responds to the assault on white supremacist mythologies by defending Confederate monuments. He dispatches federal military forces to crush antiracist protests and declares Kyle Rittenhouse a patriot for killing two unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters. And he dusts off the tried and true strategy of labeling all challengers to the regime “communists and socialists.” (When Biden brags “I beat the socialists!” and “I am the Democratic Party,” he plays right into the regime’s fictions—he is the neoliberal moderate taking back the country from rioters, fascists, and socialists.)

We keep telling ourselves that Trump was elected as a backlash to a Black president, but really he was elected as a backlash to a Black movement. President Obama presided during the killing of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland—ad infinitum. It was the mass rebellion against the lawlessness of the state—in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Baton Rouge, in New York, in Los Angeles, and elsewhere—that prompted Trumpian backlash.

We keep telling ourselves that Trump was elected as a backlash to a Black president, but really he was elected as a backlash to a Black movement. Fear and racism feed off of insecurity.

The massive vote for Trump and his fascist law-and-order rhetoric should also be seen as a backlash to a movement. Some of us believed Black Spring rebellion in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmad Arbery signaled a national reckoning around racial justice. But rather than reverse the rewhitening of America, our struggles catalyzed and concretized the racial regime’s explicit embrace of white power. Once again, an unstable ruling class drapes itself in white sheets, puts on its badge and brings out its guns. Fear and racism feed off of insecurity. And in the face of a global pandemic, joblessness, precarity, and an economy on the verge of collapse, this paltry dividend still serves.

If we’d paid attention, we wouldn’t have expected a Biden landslide or a blue wave ripping the Senate from Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell grip. It is not a coincidence that Louisville is on fire over the murder of Breonna Taylor and countless others who died at the hands of police in McConnell’s state. Kentucky has always been a battleground. California is too, and we’re not necessarily winning. Voters just defeated affirmative action, rent control, and the labor rights of gig workers. And despite some important victories, California delivered a lot of votes to Trump. We need to face the fact that our entire country, and the world, is a battleground. Trump and McConnell have succeeded in packing the Supreme Court with reactionaries. Trump’s backers still run the Senate. Gun-toting men and women in red hats stand outside vote-tabulating centers, threatening to do whatever is needed to secure a Trump victory. They yell “stop the count.”

Even with a Biden victory, the failure of the blue wave will be attributed in part to a certain kind of identity politics—Black and Latinx voter turnout less than what was expected—or to the militancy of antiracist protests, or to left-leaning candidates who scared off white moderates by pushing for single-payer healthcare and a Green New Deal. We should not see these as problems for legitimate Democrats. We’ve been witnessing authentic small-d democracy in action. In the streets we’ve seen a movement embrace Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, queer feminism, and a horizontal leadership model that emphasizes deliberative, participatory democracy.

We have an electoral college, battleground states, and voter suppression because the U.S. political order was built on anti-democracy.

This is the democracy Cedric Robinson insisted we embrace. He reminded us that the U.S. political order was built on anti-democracy, a theory of so-called enlightened governance that excludes the popular classes. This is why we have an electoral college, why we have battleground states, and why voter suppression was built into our country’s DNA. As I wrote three years ago, “today’s organized protests in the streets and other places of public assembly portend the rise of a police state in the United States. For the past five years, the insurgencies of the Movement for Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations have warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass caging of black and brown people, we are headed for a fascist state.”

We’re already here. And there is no guarantee that a Biden-Harris White House will succeed in completely reversing this trend. Nor should we expect presidents and their cabinets to do this work. That would put us back where we started—with tacit acceptance of the principles of anti-democracy.

Cedric’s words from exactly twenty years ago still haunt: “For the moment . . . an unelected government has seized illegal powers. That must be opposed with every democratic weapon in our arsenal.”

Happy Birthday, Dr. Robinson.
March 6, 2017

Cedric Robinson was fond of quoting his friend and colleague Otis Madison: “The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.” Robinson used the quote as an epigraph for a chapter in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007), titled, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the Rewhitening of America.” When people ask what I think Robinson would have said about the election of Donald Trump, I point to these texts as evidence that he had already given us a framework to make sense of this moment and its antecedents.

Robinson’s work—especially his lesser-known essays on democracy, identity, fascism, film, and racial regimes—has a great deal to teach us about Trumpism’s foundations, about democracy’s endemic crises, about the racial formation of the white working class, and about the significance of resistance in determining the future.

"Through the intervention of film, a new American social order was naturalized."

—Cedric J. Robinson

In 1915 William Joseph Simmons, an ex-preacher who made his income selling memberships in fraternal organizations, led a group of his friends atop Stone Mountain, just outside of Atlanta, burned a giant cross, and launched the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. His inspiration: seeing The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour paean to the original Klan. Simmons believed the new Klan could make America great again by purging it of un-American influences: Negroes, immigrants (except for those of Anglo and Scandinavian stock), Catholics, and Jews. Under the slogan “100 percent Americanism,” the Klan pursued a program of severe immigration restriction, allegiance to the American flag, anti-communism, protecting white womanhood (and “correcting” wayward women who transgressed gender conformity, Protestant values, and the color line), better government, and law and order, while also engaging in lynching and open acts of terrorism against black people. The second Klan appears to be a ball of contradictions—antagonistic to both big business and industrial unions, contemptuous of both elites and a huge swath of the working class (the non-white and foreign-born). But as historian Sarah Haley recently argued, the Klan—whose membership rolls swelled to four million by 1924—mobilized a precarious middle class of small entrepreneurs, white-collar workers, and farmers facing the prospect of downward mobility and seeking hope in the elimination of the most marginalized segments of society.

Cedric Robinson has a great deal to teach us about Trumpism and the significance of resistance in determining the future.

In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson explains why Griffith’s film catalyzed this movement. This was no ordinary film. Based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), it consolidated and circulated old racial fabulations and new fictions in the service of capitalist expansion and modern white supremacy—in the United States and abroad. The Birth of a Nation was historical alchemy, turning terrorists into saviors, rapists into chivalrous protectors of white women and racial purity, and courageous and visionary blacks into idle, irresponsible ignoramuses, rapists, and jezebels. Black people were not only unfit for democracy but they threatened social order. President Woodrow Wilson (who screened Griffith’s film at the White House) praised it as American history written with lightning—and like lightning, its historical reworking had an obliterating effect on truth. Robinson identified it as a “rewhitening of America,” a gallant effort to obliterate all vestiges of the black struggle for social democracy during Reconstruction.

For Robinson, 1915 marked the formation of a new “racial regime.” With the term, Robinson meant:

"Constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power. . . . [T]he covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernible origins and mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime . . . [and its] claims of naturalism.”

Racial regimes, in other words, are fictions. As such, they are unstable, fragile, and contested. The scramble to prove black inferiority and buttress white racial democracy in the era of Jim Crow was no cakewalk. The previous era had unleashed the possibility of radical change in the United States, and that struggle continued well into the twentieth century, when armed insurrection, political assassination, lynching, disfranchisement, imperialism, and federal complicity in the triumph of white supremacy destroyed the last sigh of black-led biracial democratic, populist, and radical movements.

Robinson lays out in great detail all the sites of contestation in 1915, and all the operations the new racial regime masked in the process. He reminds us that Griffith’s champion, Wilson, had opened the far Western Front of World War I when the United States invaded Haiti in 1915, long before the declaration of war on Germany. That intervention and long occupation (until 1934)—driven by U.S. finance capital—also required historical alchemy. The United States, the cause of much of Haiti’s political and economic instability, had to see itself as the country’s rescuing white knight. In the white American imagination, Haitians—like those blackface brutes in The Birth of a Nation—were seen as coons, niggers, and malevolent witchdoctors incapable of self-governance.

That May, W. E. B. Du Bois published “The African Roots of War” in Atlantic Monthly, a brilliant, prescient essay overshadowed by his folly three years later when he exhorted blacks to “close ranks” behind America’s official entry into World War I. The essay not only reveals a global racial regime in which “the white workingman has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers,’” but argues that we will never rid the world of war nor achieve democracy until we eradicate racism and colonialism. And who could lead the struggle to topple this rapacious system? None other than the descendants of “the European slave trade . . . the ten million black folk of the United States, now a problem, then a world salvation.”

The stage was set: D. W. Griffith’s New Nation versus the New Negroes. The latter resisted with pickets and boycotts, speeches and editorials, scholarship and art, and outright rebellion. They exposed the racial regime for what it was, the tyranny of white supremacy masquerading as enlightened democracy. The former, backed by finance capital and the academy, manufactured the Negro as Problem, a campaign accelerated through newer technologies of mass media. Film—whether newsreel footage of U.S. Marines entering Port-au-Prince or Griffith’s robed Klansmen saving the virginal Elsie Stoneman from the clutches of a rapacious mulatto—can mask and reorder social reality, turning victims into perpetrators and transforming imperialism into a rescue operation.

Robinson demonstrates that the post-Reconstruction order was not a return to the antebellum but a new racial and economic order that deployed a reinvention of the past in the service of a new regime. If new media played a key role, print was also crucial to this campaign. In 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, eugenicist Madison Grant’s chilling case for racial cleansing, became a national bestseller. Adolf Hitler praised the book as foundational to his own thinking. Grant’s book had plenty of company in the decade, including Robert W. Shufeldt’s America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920). White supremacy traverses the ideological spectrum, even now. Many foundational texts of the Progressive Era’s racial regime were penned by liberal social scientists obsessed with the challenges of race and empire for American democracy. Many shared the eugenicists’ presumption that democracy’s survival depends on the suppression of difference.

Racial regimes are fictions, unstable, fragile, and contested.

Franklin H. Giddings, in his 1901 book Democracy and Empire, coined the phrase “democratic empire” to suggest that imperial expansion was itself a democratizing project. It was more than just the introduction of modern infrastructure, Western education, and civilization. It was the creation of social cohesion through the rapid assimilation of subject peoples. Giddings insisted that social cohesion or some sense of solidarity is a precondition of democracy, and racial difference renders such solidarity improbable if not impossible. Sociologist John Moffatt Mecklin, a self-proclaimed Progressive liberal, published Democracy and Race Friction: A Study in Social Ethics the year before the release of The Birth of a Nation. He argues that racism and discrimination undermine democracy, but at the same time puts much of the blame on the cultural differences and “hereditary instincts” of non-whites (e.g., weak powers of inhibition, criminality, inability to control sexual impulses). Thus, while recognizing racism as a fetter on democracy, he nonetheless apologizes for white supremacy, arguing that blacks and whites have very different value systems. White supremacy is therefore a “form of self-preservation.” (He is silent on whether lynching and rape were “moral” elements of self-preservation.) The solution? Mecklin believed “industrial competition” will allow the laws of natural selection to determine the fate of non-whites, producing the “ethnic homogeneity” necessary for “an efficient democracy.”

While these texts were influential, Griffith’s masterwork and films that followed in its wake proved indispensable for installing the modern racial regime. The consequences, however fragile, were devastating—not just for African Americans but for working-class whites. As Robinson writes, Griffith and this emergent film industry constituted the social and cultural platform for a robust economic and political agenda; an agenda in the process of seizing domestic and international labor, land, and capital. . . . White patrimony deceived some of the majority of Americans, patriotism and nationalism others, but the more fugitive reality was the theft they themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others they facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation of Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a paltry dividend, but it still serves.

• • •

"I love the poorly educated."
—Donald J. Trump

The dividend still serves. Many who voted for him, including those of the alt-right, flocked to Trump because he villainized immigrants, black people, and anti-patriotic business moguls who sent jobs overseas. Most pundits insist that Trump appeals not to white racism but to working-class populism driven by class anger. If this were true, why didn’t Trump win over droves of black and brown voters, since they make up the lowest rungs of the working class and suffered disproportionately more than whites during the financial crisis of 2008? Instead Trump’s victory inspired a wave of racist attacks and emboldened white nationalists to flaunt their allegiance to the president-elect.

The response on the part of high-profile liberals and leftists has been to blame “identity politics” for undermining the potential for working-class solidarity. Mark Lilla’s New York Times screed, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” is a case in point. “In recent years,” writes Lilla, “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” The result is a “generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.” In other words, people of color, queer folks, feminist-minded women, and liberal Democrats alienated the white working class, driving it into the arms of Trump.

Movements associated with “identity liberalism” are not exclusionary, they are serious efforts to interrogate the sources and structures of inequality.

The argument is both inept and confused. The movements associated with “identity liberalism” have not been obsessed with narrow group identities but with forms of oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. And these movements are not exclusionary—not Black Lives Matter, not prison abolitionists, not movements for LGBTQ, immigrant, Muslim, and reproductive rights. They are serious efforts to interrogate the sources of persistent inequality, the barriers to equal opportunity, and the structures and policies that do harm to some groups at the expense of others.

Of course, Lilla’s arguments are hardly new. At the height of the culture wars, conservatives such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney; liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger and Allan Bloom; and self-styled leftists such as Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky argued that identity politics had undermined a unified America founded on Enlightenment principles of individualism, liberty, and secularism. A number of pundits have called Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998) prophetic because it warns that continued downward mobility of the white working class and growing income inequality would lead to the rise of a strongman with authoritarian tendencies. Rorty’s thesis was not a critique of neoliberal policies, however, but a critique of the academic left and its love affair with identity politics. “Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies,” Rorty laments, “because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.” Anyone who works on these issues at the university—then and now—will find Rorty’s assertion laughable.

Rorty, a brilliant philosopher with genuine concern for working people, nevertheless mistook ideology—a categorical opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, institutional oppression, and marginalization based on difference—for “identity politics,” while presuming that the white working class is operating purely out of race- and gender-neutral economic interests.

More conservative critics of identity politics sought to rescue Western culture from its anti-racist, feminist, and post-colonial critics. In his famous attack on multiculturalism, Arthur Schlesinger writes, “it was the West, not the non-Western cultures, that launched the crusade to abolish slavery. . . . Those many brave and humane Africans who are struggling these days for decent societies are animated by Western, not by African, ideals. White guilt can be pushed too far.” So far, in fact, that “political correctness” has been perceived as an attack on intellectual freedom and American virtues.

Robinson likened such antinomies to Christian attacks on heresy during the Middle Ages. In a short essay titled “Multiculturalism and Manichaeism,” he acknowledges what many critics of so-called “political correctness” understood: that the Schlesingers and Blooms and their compatriots across the ideological spectrum are holding on to “an imaginary transcendent universal culture—the West,” a nostalgia for a university that never was, and a mythic American identity presumably forged through an enlightened process of deracination. But Robinson knew there was more at stake. “They wish to erase the exposed seam,” he writes, “the nexus between power and regimes of knowledge so forcefully articulated by Michel Foucault. How else can one defend their specious histories of knowledge, which invoke some pristine mythical moment in the life of the American academy?”


This is not to say that Robinson’s defense of multiculturalist discourse was uncritical. He pointed to the dangers of an essentialism that reduces complex, historical experiences to fixed, discrete racial, ethnic, and gender identities. And to the left’s claim that Marxism is our way out of the Manichean world of fixed difference versus false universalism, Robinson politely demurred, citing arguments he made in Black Marxism a decade earlier. What he proposes instead is that a radical impulse in multiculturalism constitutes both a critique of the absences and an appropriation of the positive contributions of Marxism. We are not the subjects or the subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is merely one condition of our being. . . . Multiculturalism, then, is a site of discursive resistance, and emblem of articulation of several trajectories of ‘objective’ opposition (religious, nationalist, feminist, etc.) mounted by our peoples in the everyday world.

• • •

"Democratic philosophy was subverted by plutocracy . . . whose rulers depended on the preservation of a slave economy, the exploitation of ‘white’ laborers (male and female), the severe restriction of women’s political rights, and the expropriation of Native Americans."

—Cedric J. Robinson

Opponents of Trumpism—and what it portends for the future of our democratic system—are scrambling to find both “the seed of opposition” and the roots of the crisis. Locating the elusive seed of opposition is a daunting task, but it seems that most people agree that repairing our broken democracy ought to be our priority.

Cedric Robinson had a lot to say about democracy—as a theory, an aspiration, and a fiction. As a child of World War II who came of age with the Cold War and the civil rights movement, he encountered the word “democracy” at every turn. Democracy was bandied about as an explanation for America’s frequent military excursions abroad, while at home it was an elusive dream for which black people were arrested, beaten, even killed.

Critics of so-called political correctness are holding on to an imaginary transcendent universal culture—the West.

Robinson studied democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, and fought for it as a leader of the campus naacp and as an activist in slate, a forerunner of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In the summer of 1962, he witnessed firsthand a struggle to create a multiethnic democracy in Southern Rhodesia crushed by the state. He was there under the auspices of Operation Crossroads—a precursor to the Peace Corps that sent student volunteers to Africa to help build libraries, schools, and community centers.

Founded by Harlem Presbyterian minister James H. Robinson and backed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Operation Crossroads was also a Cold War project designed to combat communism and spread American democracy to the continent. During his month-long stay, Cedric watched the U.S.-backed regime led by the fascist Rhodesian Front violently repress and ultimately outlaw the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu). Upon his return to Berkeley, Robinson enrolled in three political science courses, including one on African politics, in his quest to comprehend democracy, and he would go on to do graduate work in political science at San Francisco State University and at Stanford.

In an essay titled “African Politics: Progression or Regression?” written for a Stanford graduate seminar taught by David Abernethy (then a young scholar who wrote on popular education in Africa), Robinson argued that the newly “decolonized” territories in Africa were not yet nations. For him the “birth” of decolonialized African states required shedding Western political structures and creating their own political institutions. More provocatively, he suggests that the modern nation-state is, in fact, “a regression or step backward from the stateless societies of some earlier African history.” Here he begins to reveal the seeds of his argument in Black Marxism (1983) that the black petit bourgeoisie was disconnected from the political and cultural traditions that sustained anti-colonial movements in the past. He writes that those living in exile or European educated “have betrayed the heritage of their predecessors in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” indigenous leaders “who were committed through their own particular missions to the recovery of life with integrity for the mass of African people.” The alternative path he imagines is not based on modernization theory or industrialization but something different:

Perhaps what is needed are new political organisations without single or even multiple leaders, but with no leaders at all. . . . That is a sophisticated social organization; a primitive organization is one where the courts are filled with defendants bound and gagged or where its citizens must be shot down in the streets and terrorized in to fitful conformity.

Robinson never abandoned this radical utopian vision of democracy, although as the promise of the 1960s and ’70s faded into the revanchism of the 1980s and ’90s, he turned to the genesis of the “primitive organization” that became the U.S. political system. He traced the ideological roots of U.S. democracy back to the profoundly anti-democratic strain in Plato and Aristotle. For Robinson the “crisis” of democracy was not simply the result of the corrosive forces of neoliberalism but endemic from its very inception. His provocative essay “Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy” (1995) locates the genesis of anti-democracy in The Republic, which accepts slavery and proposes a theory of enlightened governance that excludes the popular classes. Slavery in Plato’s politics was an immutable fact, the slave an inferior being bereft of reason and thus incapable of participating in democracy, let alone governing. “Plato’s political theory,” writes Robinson, “thus repressed the history of popular rebellion and with it the recognition that social agency might have its genesis from the general populace. Even in his ‘treatment’ of the degeneracy of democracy to tyranny, the demos is denied true agency through the selection of a demagogue.” Robinson wryly concludes, “In its antidemocratic plutocratic prejudice, the Republic provides an authority rich in intellectual strategems a propos to the political discourse embedded in the American political order. Plato survives because if he had not existed, he would have to be invented.”


It should come as no surprise that the founding fathers were avid readers of Plato and Aristotle, who were—along with Homer—the pillars of classical philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Distrust of democracy was widespread. James Madison even positively described the new state as an “oligarchy.” Landholding, Madison insisted, had to be a requirement for participation in the body politic “as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The result, besides property requirements for voting, was the Electoral College. For some proponents, the Electoral College would be the enlightened check against the threat of an ignorant populace backing a demagogue as president. But it also guaranteed a pro-slavery White House. Basic to the college’s architecture was the Three-Fifths Compromise, the rule that congressional representation in the slave states would be apportioned by counting the white population along with 60 percent of enslaved people. The number of electors was to be equal to the number of representatives and senators from each state. This gave the slaveholding South an edge in presidential elections compared to other states, and that advantage lasted well after slavery ended, since the vast majority of black southerners were disfranchised after Reconstruction.

Ironically, critics of the Electoral College who believe Hillary Clinton should be president based on the popular vote are now invoking Alexander Hamilton’s idea of the “conscientious” elector who will buck party affiliation in order to make the enlightened choice. Hence, an anti-democratic institution is invoked as both the problem and solution, fueling the myth of American democracy’s singular genius while remaining “openly hostile to the periodic outbreaks of what it redundantly terms ‘participatory’ or ‘direct’ democracy.”


• • •


"When the performance of charismatic leadership stands in for building movements and relationships, for grassroots political education, and for a practiced commitment to disassembling social hierarchies, the promise of social justice and political empowerment is endangered by a formation of authority that limits our capacities to remake the world."
—Erica R. Edwards


In 2016, on the heels of the centennial celebration of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the Sundance Film Festival screened a new film bearing the same title. Nate Parker, the young African American actor who wrote, directed, and starred in the film appropriated the title from Griffith as a deliberate provocation. His historical epic is about Nat Turner, the Virginia slave-turned-minister who led the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history. Like Griffith, Parker simultaneously revised history while reflecting and refracting current political realities. It is impossible to watch Parker’s The Birth of a Nation without recalling the recent wave of police killings and rage and resistance it has generated. Yet whereas Griffith’s racist epic made history, Parker’s film flopped. Revelations of Parker’s involvement in a sexual assault twenty years earlier dampened ticket sales, and cinematic representations of black rebellion tend to do poorly at the box office. But neither adequately explains the film’s epic failure.


In both Births, women are territory to be fought over, attacked, and defended. Whereas the Klan avenged the nation and their manhood by rooting out alleged black rapists, Turner and his men avenged their nation and their manhood for the rape of their women by white masters and overseers. As critic and historian Salamishah Tillett observed, Parker’s film thus silences black women, turning them into mute victims. “In denying these women their revolutionary gestures, Mr. Parker risks making them objects that he, and only he, can freely move around the screen.” Noting the film’s appearance during the height of black resistance to police violence, she adds that its emphasis on the male charismatic leader is “out of step” with the Movement for Black Lives and its largely black female leadership. I would add that the movement’s embrace of black queer feminism, its horizontal leadership model, and emphasis on deliberative, participatory democracy counter the film’s central vision.


For the past five years Black Lives Matter warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence, we are headed for a fascist state.


Robinson understood the charismatic figure in insurgent movements as “the expression of a people focused onto one of their members . . . the responsive instrument of a people,” rather than the force or agent directing the people forward. This is certainly not how Parker portrayed Turner, which suggests that Robinson may have been sympathetic to Tillet’s reading of the film. But he would have also insisted that the female-led, horizontal formations resisting state violence today are not aberrations but consistent with the black radical tradition. H. L. T. Quan reminds us of the centrality women in Robinson’s historical archeology of black revolt. “Indeed,” Quan writes, “the women who people Robinson’s imagination are not the anorexic two-dimensional (mainstream) feminist heroines whom we often encounter in gender-related texts, but the plotters of history. They are women of substance, of imagination, of formidable social force, women who would kill and wage revolutions against the state and the world economy.”


Just as Nat Turner’s rebellion portended chattel slavery’s violent demise, today’s organized protests in the streets and other places of public assembly portend the rise of a police state in the United States. For the past five years, the insurgencies of the Movement for Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations have warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass caging of black and brown people, we are headed for a fascist state.


Others argue that fascism is already here. Refusing to play politics, they criticize both Democrats and Republicans. They have angered cops by insisting that no law officer is above reproach. Skeptical of courtroom justice, they have taken to the streets, social media, the press, and even the United Nations, placing the moral, ethical, and legal question about the value of black lives before the world court of opinion. The movement has also proposed a plan to divest from a society of punishment, inequality, environmental degradation, and white supremacy and invest in a future built on free education, healthcare, housing, living-wage jobs, decriminalization, restorative justice in lieu of caging, food justice, and green energy. We need to remember this before more angry liberals—forgetting the misogynist strain in white identity politics—blame the Movement for Black Lives for Clinton’s defeat and for mau-mauing white folks into the arms of Trump.


Those of us who lived through the Reagan era have seen these dynamics before, though on a smaller scale. Ronald Reagan’s election not only owed much to white working-class resentment and middle-class white homeowners seeking tax relief, but his ascent to office coincided with heightened police and vigilante violence. In 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan assassinated five members of the Communist Workers Party in broad daylight. In Mississippi in 1980, at least twelve African Americans were lynched. The same year at least forty racially motivated murders occurred in cities as diverse as Buffalo, Atlanta, and Mobile. Across the country, police killings and non-lethal acts of brutality generated protests, notably a massive urban rebellion in Liberty City, Florida. And during Reagan’s eight years in office, the number of hate crimes reported annually in the United States grew threefold. Faced with a dramatic rise in racism, unemployment, and homelessness, followed by deep cuts in social programs and increases in military spending, black resistance ramped up. The late historian and activist Manning Marable had even referred to 1980 as “The Red Year,” a revolutionary moment similar to 1919.


Robinson shared some of Marable’s optimism. It was, after all, the period in which he wrote Black Marxism, which compelled him to undertake a substantive study of fascism since the book’s three main subjects—W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright—were all radicalized during the 1930s. The dark times under Reagan resonated with his reading of the history of America’s support of fascism. For example, the American capitalist class was sympathetic to Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. J. P. Morgan loaned Italy in excess of $100 million in 1926, and Fortune Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Business Weekly, and the New Republic all ran admiring spreads on Italian fascism up until the mid-1930s. Robinson’s central point was that the black masses not only anticipated the rise of fascism, they resisted before it was considered a crisis. Robinson called them “premature antifascists,” noting that they had stood in stark opposition to those elites enamored with fascism, “which gave primacy to the interests of the State as an instrument of racial ‘destiny.’”

Trump’s election does not signal the strengthening and consolidation of U.S. power but its decline. Contemporary resistance movements did not ensure Clinton’s defeat, but they did reveal the regime’s fragility. The Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Mater, the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, Million Hoodies, the Moral Mondays Movement, the uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson—not to mention the immigrant rights movement, and the ongoing struggle in Standing Rock in defense of Native sovereignty and against the war on the planet—all presaged and accelerated the current crisis of the state.


Robinson teaches us that racial regimes are unstable. They can be disassembled, though that is easier said than done. In the meantime, we need to be prepared to fight for our collective lives. I can hear Cedric’s timely counsel in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s “fraudulent” defeat of Al Gore in 2000: “For the moment . . . an unelected government has seized illegal powers. That must be opposed with every democratic weapon in our arsenal.”


Robin D. G. Kelley


ABOUT THR AUTHOR:


Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is author many books including Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.


TAGS: Politics Race Capitalism Justice Trump


IMAGE: A promotional poster for the film 'Birth of a Nation' (1915)