D. Z. Shaw: Notes for a Critique of Dimitrov, the Orthodox Line on Fascism, and the Popular Front Strategy

I. The Three Way Fight and the Critique of the Orthodox Line

The three way fight is a revolutionary anti-capitalist approach to fighting fascism. It begins from the premise that the best-known communist definition of fascism—the “orthodox line,” which categorizes fascism as the politics or policy of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie—not only led to historical failures in the struggle against fascism, but also fails to accurately theorize and describe the threat posed by the far right in contemporary North American settler-colonial societies (the focus of my work) and elsewhere.
The three way fight position emerged as a minority tendency within the anti-fascist work of Anti-Racist Action.¹ A core premise of the three way fight is that revolutionary anti-fascist organizing struggles on two fronts, against capitalism (and its attendant forms of liberalism) and the far right. In other words, one basic premise of the three way fight—which breaks with the orthodox line—is that far-right movements (of which fascism is one tendency) are not merely the shock troops of the most reactionary capitalists.² They may at points collaborate with the police or find common cause with some factions of capital, but far-right movements are system-oppositional forms of organizing. What that means will be discussed in more detail below.
I assume, given that the three way fight position was (and is) a minority tendency within anti-fascist organizing, that the reader may not be entirely familiar with its history. The Three Way Fight project launched in 2004 as a nonsectarian forum for revolutionary anti-capitalists to discuss and debate anti-fascist theory and politics. Although the project began in 2004, the contributors and organizers associated with it have among them substantial experience in anti-fascist organizing. Hamerquist in particular has a history with The Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and Anti-Racist Action.³ While the work is driven by experience in anti-fascist organizing, contributors often refer back to a number of pivotal works that have developed the three way fight position: Don Hamerquist’s and J. Sakai’s essays in Confronting Fascism (2002), the anthology My Enemy’s Enemy (2001), and, more recently, Matthew N. Lyons’ Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far-Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (2018).⁴
My current research focuses on using the theoretical framework of the three way fight to rethink the history of revolutionary anti-capitalist anti-fascism. The history of revolutionary critiques of fascism is often told from a European perspective because fascist movements seized power in Italy and Germany. However, it remains insufficient to mechanically apply those critiques to a different socio-political conjuncture. Thus, I believe certain historical resources, which were not necessarily framed as “anti-fascist” at the time, open an alternative path to understanding fascism and the far right, especially the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and his concept of a “public and psychological wage” of whiteness, which has become better known—via David Roediger—as the “wages of whiteness.”⁵
I will argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility, an epistemic rupture and hence a split, between the orthodox line upheld by the Communist International (Comintern) and later the Black Panther Party, and an anti-fascist theory grounded in Du Bois’ concept of the wages of whiteness. While it is a historical coincidence that Dimitrov’s The Fascist Offensive and Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction were published in the same year, 1935, we cannot ignore that they were shaped by the challenges of the same historical conjuncture—likewise with the fact that in the late 1960s, in the midst of a wave of reaction against Black Power, the Panthers and James Boggs arrived at opposing theories of fascism, calling back to Dimitrov and Du Bois, respectively. In sum, Dimitrov and Du Bois represent two incompatible explanatory models for understanding fascism. Their “split,” as it were, “haunts” the left in its struggle against capitalism and the far right—reemerging in the late 1960s, for example, in the opposing concepts of fascism advanced by the Black Panther Party and James Boggs—and it continues up through the present day.
In this essay I have opted to focus on one particular aspect of the project: to submit both the orthodox line on fascism and the popular front strategy to a critique based on the three way fight position. Then, in the Epilogue, I will sketch an alternative approach, taking Lenin’s concept of labor aristocracy and Du Bois’ concept of the wages of whiteness as my points of departure. Thus when I argue that there is an epistemological rupture between the orthodox line and the revolutionary anti-fascist trajectory that has informed the three way fight position, there is a dialectic of continuity and epistemic rupture. There is continuity in that both the orthodox line and the three way fight both call back to anti-imperialism. Nevertheless, Du Bois’ anti-imperialism and anti-racism—which, in my view, play an important intellectual role in the revolutionary anti-fascist alternative represented in the three way fight—do not merely amend, elaborate, or readjust the orthodox line. Between Dimitrov and Du Bois there is an epistemic rupture that must be acknowledged and theorized in order to advance the development of revolutionary, militant anti-fascist theory.

The Class Character of Fascism and Its Threat

The orthodox concept fof fascism holds that fascism is commanded by the most reactionary elements of finance capital; in other words, the relationship between a fascist movement’s organizational leadership, located in a narrow section of the bourgeoisie, and its mass base is top down. Rather than assert that fascism possesses unequivocal class character, the three way fight position explores how the “mass” or “popular” elements of far-right movements recruit across class (and sometimes racial) lines.⁶ In my view, in contemporary North America, they typically recruit among the petty bourgeoisie and the “worker elite” or “labor aristocracy” (including declassed or lumpen elements from these strata), who tend to shape the ideological contours and organizational direction of these movements. Therefore, the three way fight perspective maintains that there is a degree of relative autonomy—rather than the unilateral direction of command—between reactionary far-right ideologues among the bourgeoisie and far-right movements on the ground. The fact that there is relative autonomy between these groups does not preclude politicians, intellectuals, or military personnel from participating in, or providing leadership and legitimacy to, fascist social movements. However, this fact does mean that fascist movements cannot be treated as a mere epiphenomenon of capitalist rule. Instead, fascist movements are “system-oppositional,” meaning they pose a social and political challenge to the status quo.
Therefore, the three way fight position describes fascism as a social movement involving a relatively autonomous and insurgent (potentially) mass base, which, like other far-right movements, challenges state power, even though it promotes and aims to re-entrench economic and social hierarchies. On this basis, the three way fight situates militant anti-fascist struggle as a fight on two fronts, against two relatively autonomous social forces: against the far right (of which fascism is a part) and against bourgeois capitalist rule.
Here are three examples of three-way fight discussions of fascism.

• In “Fascism and Anti-Fascism” (2002), Don Hamerquist observes “that fascism has the potential to become a mass movement with a substantial and genuine element of revolutionary anti-capitalism. Nothing but mistakes will result from treating it as ‘bad’ capitalism—as, in the language of the Comintern, ‘the policy of the most reactionary sections of big capital’. . . . The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left.”⁷
• In “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism” (2008), Matthew N. Lyons proposes the following definition: “Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while promoting economic and social hierarchy.”⁸
• In my work, I propose that “Fascism is a social movement involving a relatively autonomous and insurgent (potentially) mass base, driven by an authoritarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges bourgeois institutional and cultural power, while re-entrenching economic and social hierarchies.”

There are differences between us of emphasis and differences concerning which aspect of bourgeois or capitalist power far-right system-oppositional movements challenge. However, we share the following three convictions. First, that far-right street movements possess a degree of autonomy from far-right factions that may exist in institutions of power. Second, that the far-right challenges some aspects of bourgeois institutional and cultural power. And, third, that fascism could be supported by some factions of capitalists, but that these factions do not command far-right movements, and that transclass collaboration would impose conditions on these reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie. In sum, underlying all three formulations is the concept that fascist social movements are not merely the shock troops of a reactionary faction of the bourgeoisie; they have a relative degree of autonomy and may even disrupt the ordinary functioning of bourgeois governance, although they desire to re-entrench economic and social hierarchies within society.
Hence it should be clear that the orthodox line, that “fascism in power is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,”⁹ misses the mark. Despite its insufficiency, however, it remains the prevalent view within the left. For some, its appeal rests on its seeming conformity with Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Lenin argues that politically, “imperialism is . . . a striving towards violence and reaction,” while economically, it is marked by the predominance of finance capital over industrial capital.”¹⁰ For others, the orthodox line remains valuable as the underpinning for leftist coalition-building through popular fronts. The orthodox line characterizes fascism as political tendency of a very narrow faction of finance capital, which permits revolutionary, militant, or vanguard formations to ally with nonrevolutionary, generally liberal, organizations. For example, Dimitrov mentions “joint action with Social-Democratic Parties, reformist trade unions, and other organizations of the toilers against the class enemies of the proletariat.”¹¹
A popular front can be a useful organizing tool for counter-mobilizing against far-right movements when they take to the streets. I will argue that Dimitrov’s position, as a totality, directs popular fronts to build coalitions to pressure parliamentary systems from preparing the path toward a fascist seizure of power. After discussing Dimitrov’s popular front strategy, I will then briefly review the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against Fascism. There, I will contend that the BPP’s own anti-fascist attempt to mobilize a popular front to challenge the use of police violence was hemmed in by an unexamined assumption of legalism.
In brief, I will argue that this type of popular front strategy makes two mistakes. First, it risks confusing intensified state repression, which is nevertheless part of the ordinary functioning of capitalist power, for fascism. In other words, from a popular front perspective following the orthodox line, fascism is seen as an instrument of the most reactionary elements of capital, and the primary threat of fascism in power is that it implements a form of state power that is more repressive and reactionary than the ordinary functioning of capitalist power. Then, on the basis of this concept of fascism, popular front strategies tend toward pressuring the state apparatus either to forestall implementing the “preparatory stages” toward fascism or to revert to the ordinary functioning of bourgeois governance. In my view, organizing popular fronts to pressure parliamentary institutions is a rearguard strategy. Anti-fascist work must proactively focus on undermining the potentially mass or popular base of fascist organizing, such as no-platforming or community self-defense actions (which is how I refer to anti-fascist work to prevent fascism movements from taking and holding public spaces).

Social Demagoguery and the Potential Mass Appeal of Fascism

Nevertheless, one could argue that Dimitrov explains the transclass character of fascism as a product of social demagoguery. In other words, he not only acknowledges the transclass character of fascism but also explains it as the product of propaganda that appeals to the needs and the demands, even a sense of economic justice, felt by the masses—promises that fascism’s imperialist program cannot fulfill.
However, the three way fight rejects the top-down model of political action that is advanced by Dimitrov and emblematic of communist theory of that period. He posits that fascism must be directed by some faction of capitalists that commands the mass base. In my view, pointing to social demagoguery is a superficial explanation that largely evades a materialist explanation of why fascist movements could appeal to a mass base. Hamerquist notes that orthodox communist analyses of fascism tend to explain the appeal of fascism to forms of false consciousness or temporary and accidental features of capitalist development; in sum, “there was little serious examination of the actual and potential mass popular appeal of fascism.”¹² Indeed, I will argue that Dimitrov’s explanation also sidesteps the racist and anti-semitic underpinnings of fascist nationalism.
The three way fight position holds that fascist ideology is motivated by a totalizing vision of collective rebirth. Matthew N. Lyons arrived at this position (which I share), in “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism,” in an attempt to synthesize Hamerquist’s and Sakai’s discussions of the system-oppositional character of fascism with the ideology critique of fascism carried out by liberal historian Roger Griffin. Griffin argues that fascist ideology is a populist “palingenetic” ultranationalism.¹³ Since we have defined fascism as an insurgent, potentially mass movement, we need not adopt his characterization of fascist ideology as populist. For Lyons, fascism centers a myth of collective rebirth after a period of—or the perception of—crisis, decline, or decadence. The fascist defines the nation as the realization of an organic unity organized around what its protagonists see as a natural order. As Lyons summarizes, fascist ultranationalism “fundamentally rejects the liberal principles of pluralism and individual rights, as well as the socialist principles of class-based solidarity and internationalism, all of which threaten the nation’s organic unity.”¹⁴ On this basis, I will criticize Dimitrov’s discussion of social demagoguery. I will also argue that far-right movements in North America have a very specific vision of national rebirth, one which views collective rebirth as the re-entrenchment of the social and political hierarchies of settler-state hegemony, but on terms conducive to these movements.

II. Critique of the Orthodox Line

Overview

The orthodox communist line on fascism was put forward in 1933 by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Two years later, it was implemented as the basis of the popular front line, which was announced and outlined by Georgi Dimitrov in two speeches to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International that were published not long thereafter: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Fight for the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism and a separate speech, Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism.
Before outlining the critique of the orthodox line, I think it worthwhile to pause and consider how it came to have an enduring appeal. The Comintern’s popular front line has been denounced as at several junctures as “right opportunism,” or attacked for sacrificing the political needs of local anti-fascist struggles to defend the Soviet Union. However, acknowledging these criticisms gets us no closer to understanding why the orthodox line has long survived beyond its application to the popular front line, pulled from Dimitrov’s argument and re-elaborated within contemporary junctures.
One answer has to do with the text of Dimitrov’s The Fascist Offensive: first, its textual organization is conducive to study and reference. Though almost three-quarters of the essay outlines now obsolete instructions on organizing popular fronts, the first section, “Fascism and the Working Class,” presents a concise synopsis of the problem, in which Dimitrov defines fascism and the political threat it represents to the proletariat; he explains the transclass character of fascism’s mass base as a product of social demagoguery; and, finally, he forecasts the ultimate failure of fascism due to the primary contradiction of its class character. In large part, our analysis below focuses on a critical assessment of Dimitrov’s well-known slogans and assertions from that section.
Then there are political answers to the question. On the one hand, some adherents to the orthodox line are committed to defending and preserving an anti-fascist approach that has the imprimatur of “official” communism, and Dimitrov’s essays, written as they are by the head of the Comintern, are as “official” as it gets. On the other hand, for some, the popular front is idealized as nonsectarian, mass organizing that averts the sectarianism that plagues other types of communist organizing. These answers, so far, do not explain how the popular front line escaped the perimeters of communist and social-democratic organizing circles.
In his recent book, Everything is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism, Joseph Fronczak argues that it was anti-fascist organizing during 1934–1936 that forged the idea of “the left” as a “mass global collectivity” which transcends parties and national borders. In his view, popular front organizing (which included the Comintern’s popular front work but was not led by it) played an important role in creating this new idea of the left.¹⁵ In Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States, Christopher Vials contends that anti-fascist cultural work, including aspects of the popular front in the 1930s and early 1940s, played a role in fortifying labor movements and anti-racist struggles, while creating “a remarkably tenacious political grammar that would help place the hard right on the defensive for a generation.”¹⁶ In my view, though, the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against Fascism (UFAF) initiative is the most influential factor that explains the enduring appeal of the orthodox line and the popular front now. As Vials observes,

the Panthers evoked fascism more often than any postwar political organization in the United States as a whole. . . . The BPP did not single-handedly add fascism to the lexicon of radicals in the late 1960s, but, as a result of their efforts, anti-fascism became a more conscious political mode among other politically emergent groups, particularly Latinos, Asian Americans, and white student radicals.¹⁷

Their “Call for a United Front Against Fascism,” announcing the UFAF conference (held in Oakland in July 1969), draws on Dimitrov’s popular front essays. Their definition of fascism introduces a slight change that emphasizes the racist character of this capitalist reaction:

• Dimitrov: “fascism in power is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”¹⁸
• The Black Panther Party: “Fascism is the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic (racist) and the most imperialist elements of finance capital.”¹⁹

Immediately after the definition of fascism, the “Call” parallels, with some slight changes and deletions of historically dated references, Dimitrov’s rejection of competing accounts of the class character of fascism.²⁰ On the basis of these parallels and due to the enormous vanguardist and cultural caché that the BPP held at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Panthers lent a renewed legitimacy to both the orthodox line and the popular front that continues to the present day. Nevertheless, I will contend that their self-conscious appropriation of Dimitrov and the popular front implemented a legalist framework that defines fascism as the use of state violence that transgresses bourgeois legality, and anti-fascist work as coalition building to counter fascism by pressuring state institutions to observe their supposed legalist boundaries.

1. The Popular Front: Isolating Fascism and Its Threat

Dimitrov on Fascism in Power

Dimitrov describes the threat posed by fascism plainly in the opening paragraphs of The Fascist Offensive; the bourgeoisie needs fascism: “to place the whole burden of crisis on the backs of the toilers”; “to solve the problem of markets by enslaving the weak nations” through colonial annexation or repartition; and, to smash revolutionary movements that aim to overthrow capitalism.²¹ When we review the historical record, there is no doubt that fascist movements in Germany and Italy sought to break the political power of organized labor, to build nationalist sentiment through imperialist expansion, and to smash revolutionary movements. And we know for fascists of all eras that they are not only willing to use violence to suppress their opponents but that they venerate violence itself.
However, when we review Dimitrov’s outline of how fascists wield power, we encounter numerous contradictions—one is especially prominent in his discussion of fascist state power. He states: the fascist accession to power “is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution for one State form of class domination of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois democracy—of another form—open terrorist dictatorship.”²² This claim draws a clear line between ordinary bourgeois governance and fascist state power. Because fascist state power implements an open terrorist dictatorship that interrupts normal bourgeois government, the popular front line permits communist parties to ally with nonrevolutionary organizations as an emergency measure to prevent the rise of additional fascist states.
The clear line between ordinary bourgeois governance and fascist state power begins to dissolve when Dimitrov attempts to explain the distinction further, i.e., criticize Social-Democratic leadership for capitulating to fascists. He suggests that fascism ascends to power in the midst of political crisis within different camps of the bourgeoisie, and “even within the fascist camp itself.”²³ Due to this struggle, he claims, “before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and institute a number of reactionary measures, which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism.”²⁴
Dimitrov argues that fascism in power transforms state power, transgressing the ordinary succession and functioning of bourgeois governance, and that fascism ascends to power typically after crises in bourgeois governance have proceeded through a series of preparatory stages. When we review the historical record, there is evidence that fascism transforms state power, though crises in bourgeois governance prepare the way. As evidence for the former claim, the Nazis were not merely a typical bourgeois conservative party and their political program clearly transgressed bourgeois legalism. But, as evidence for the latter claim, it was a conservative party leader, Franz von Papen, who in the midst of crisis “deposed the legitimately elected government of the state (Land) of Prussia . . . and prevailed upon President Hindenburg to use his emergency powers to install a new state administration headed by von Papen,” in 1932, the year before Hitler was named Chancellor.²⁵ Nonetheless, the problem remains that Dimitrov’s account focuses almost exclusively on bourgeois factional struggle and parliamentarian maneuvering. I think it is correct that fascist movements, when they seek power, seek to exploit factional struggles in the ruling class. However, we cannot leave out how fascism leverages its organizational strength through its street-level or mass base.
Hence a practical and organizational problem arises. Dimitrov issues the clear instruction that popular front formations must “fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages” of bourgeois crisis.²⁶ However, by treating the “preparatory stages” as moments of parliamentarian factional struggle, Dimitrov directs popular fronts toward coalition building within the broader left to put popular pressure on parliamentarian institutions, in order to forestall non-fascist governments from preparing the way for fascism. In my view, anti-fascist organizing must begin the fight long before fascist movements build a parliamentarian base. Fascist movements are, first, street-level, potentially mass movements that utilize violence to attack, harass, and/or intimidate their opponents. Therefore, fascist movements are to some degree system-oppositional, e.g., willing to transgress bourgeois legalism or challenge bourgeois institutional or cultural power. These aspects are already evident, or these so-called “preparatory stages” are already prepared when fascist movements enter parliamentarian institutions. The three way fight position offers a clearer line of demarcation between far-right movements and ordinary bourgeois conservative parties.
Then, there remains a contradiction within Dimitrov’s account of the continuity and rupture between ordinary bourgeois governance and fascism in power. Because he does not consider how the potentially mass-base, system-oppositional aspects of fascist movements constitute the rupture with ordinary bourgeois governance, it appears that fascism and ordinary rule are two alternative forms of bourgeois governance. As a result, the lack of a clear demarcation permits a conceptual confusion between the repressive features of ordinary bourgeois governance and fascism. For instance, in “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions” (1978), Noel Ignatiev criticizes the broad application of the term “fascism,” noting that welfare cuts, anti-union legislation, suppression of dissent, and increased police powers are all examples of ordinary bourgeois governance that have been “described as ‘fascist,’ or at the very least as steps toward fascism, by many left-wing organizations.”²⁷

The United Front Against Fascism

We may bring the underlying problem into sharper relief by examining the revival of the popular front line by the Black Panther Party in 1969, when they called the United Front Against Fascism conference in order to form a multiracial coalition to defend the BPP. Delegates to the conference were to set up local chapters of the National Committee to Combat Fascism. The “Call” for the UFAF conference states:

Because of the rise in political awareness of Black people, the high degree of student activism and the overall expansion of progressive forces, this government is finding it necessary to drop its disguise of democracy and go openly into FASCISM.²⁸

I have already identified several similarities between Dimitrov and the BPP’s “Call,” including the definition of fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital. The excerpted passage above additionally describes the counterrevolutionary character of fascism. Elsewhere, the Panthers also attempt to contrast fascism against the ordinary functioning of bourgeois rule, while maintaining the particularity of US anti-black racism. Kathleen Cleaver writes, in “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder” (1968), that

The advent of fascism in the United States is most clearly visible in the suppression of the black liberation struggle in the nationwide political imprisonment and assassination of black leaders coupled with the concentration of massive police power in the ghettos of the black community across the country. . . . Black people have always been subjected to [a] police state and have moved to organize against it, but the structure is now moving to encompass the entire country.²⁹

Cleaver’s account recognizes that Black communities face suppression as part of the ordinary business of bourgeois rule, but she notes two new features of state violence: political assassination (among other forms of intensifying the suppression of Black liberation struggle) and the expansion of police violence in order to suppress white dissent. Her position is largely recapitulated in the “Call” for the UFAF conference.
Surprisingly, then, the Panthers sought to fight back through legal pressure. Vials notes that the BPP had a “modest domestic legislative goal . . . decentralized policing, wherein black and white neighborhoods would self-manage the police in their respective communities. In fact, a legally drawn petition for a referendum on community policing in the city of Oakland was already in place at the time of the conference.”³⁰ Numerous critics have argued that the UFAF initiative marked a shift toward reformism. I’m not sure “reformism” best describes the political framework here, so I will instead explore how the Panthers inadvertently set a legalistic framework for anti-fascist work.
In We Want Freedom, his semi-autobiographical history of the Black Panther Party, Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that the underlying philosophical basis of the BPP’s organizational efforts was legalism. He writes:

While some might identify the philosophical basis [of the BPP] as Marxism, or its later variation, Maoism, others would prefer Black Nationalism, Black revolutionary internationalism, or, as we have suggested, Malcolmism.
None of these truly answer the question, for while they identify a stage of the Party’s ideological development, the underlying philosophical approach, as based in Huey [Newton] as the heart of the Party, was essentially a legalist one.³¹

We typically describe social movements that limit their activity to legal avenues as legalist. Here, Abu-Jamal uses the term to describe a theory of state power; thus, legalism is a belief “that there were limits to what the government would do to preserve its hold on power.”³² It has often been recognized that Newton placed a significant value in legal concepts, but Abu-Jamal argues that legalism underlies much of the BPP’s work. The Panthers’ use of self-defense was couched in the assertion of constitutional rights, while core documents such as the 10-Point Platform and Program cite the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.³³
Abu-Jamal contends that the Black Panther Party failed to anticipate the counterinsurgency measures that the US security apparatus would take to undermine their organizing due to their unexamined legalist assumption about state power. Here, I want to apply Abu-Jamal’s thesis to the BPP’s anti-fascist work. In my view, Dimitrov’s line (encompassing both the orthodox line and the popular front strategy) appeared theoretically viable because the BPP upheld an unexamined adherence to a legalist strategy. The “advent of fascism,” in Cleaver’s terms, occurs when police power oversteps the limits of bourgeois legality, which the United Front Against Fascism sought to combat through legal pressure. The Panthers were not alone in advocating for some degree of community control over policing. However, the BPP differs from groups such as the Deacons for Defense because they self-consciously adopted the mantle of a revolutionary vanguard party.
The BPP’s anti-fascist work was torn by a contradiction between their explicit ideological development and their philosophical basis. Cleaver writes, for instance, in “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” that “the day when the state and its police power ceases to protect the community but in turn attacks the people of the community has arrived in this country. This is the first stage of building a total police state.”³⁴ She may be evoking liberal rhetoric to interpolate the liberal-minded reader. Whether or not this is her intent, her argument assumes the liberal premise that community safety is the objective, universal basis of policing, rather than the repressive force required to maintain class (and racial) rule. Hence this underlying assumption contradicts the BPP’s explicit ideological position, although it would fit within what Abu-Jamal refers to as their legalist philosophical basis. In sum, there is a contradiction between their philosophical basis and their ideological position, generally aligned with a Marxist position, that police are the instrument of class (and racial) rule. In The Civil War in France, Marx writes:

At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.³⁵

Obviously, Marx wrote before the historical emergence of fascism. Perhaps one could deduce, on the basis of Marx’s observation, a theory of preparatory stages anticipating fascism. However, I would contend that his analysis of police power and the state in The Civil War in France supports the contention that the intensification of repressive measures to attack revolutionary movements may occur as part of the ordinary measures of bourgeois class rule. In other words, state repression in itself is not a sufficient condition to categorize a state as fascist.
It is my view that the theoretical and practical framework constituted by the combination of the orthodox line and the popular front strategy leads anti-fascist work to defend democratic and legalist, rather than militant, political goals, as many critics have shown. Robin D. G. Kelley, in Hammer and Hoe, observes that during the popular front period the CPUSA

practically ceased to function as an independent, autonomous organization . . . the failure of the CIO’s Operation Dixie, anticommunism within the AFL-CIO, not to mention the anticommunism of the NAACP, weakened or destroyed the Communist-led unions, leaving an indelible mark on the next wave of civil rights activists and possibly arresting what may have been a broader economic and social justice agenda.³⁶

Given the ongoing political and cultural interest in the Black Panther Party, their anti-fascist work may have also left an indelible mark on the “common sense” view of what fascism is and how to fight it. However, ultimately, it is my view that Dimitrov’s account of the popular front strategy and its underlying theoretical basis that sets limited parameters on anti-fascist work, parameters that too narrowly focus on preventing parliamentarian institutions from preparing the stage for the fascist seizure of power.³⁷

2. The Class Character of Fascism and the Problem of Demagoguery

Dimitrov defines fascism as a program of the most reactionary or extreme faction of the bourgeoisie, and yet, he must still explain one of the most obvious elements of fascist movements: their mass base. Throughout The Fascist Offensive, Dimitrov explains the mass base and transclass character of fascist movements as a product of social demagoguery. Dimitrov is not the first to point toward social demagoguery to explain the mass, transclass base of fascism; by 1935 it had become a longstanding practice of the Comintern. For example, in 1922, the Fourth Congress’ resolution “On the Tactics of the Comintern,” included the statement that “the Fascists do not merely form narrow counterrevolutionary fighting organizations, armed to the teeth, but also attempt through social demagoguery to achieve a base among the masses.”³⁸ However, social demagoguery is an insufficient explanation for the appeal of fascism. By contrast, Du Bois’ concept of the wages of whiteness can explain the appeal through material interests and identity formation. The concept of the wages of whiteness provides content to the ideology of North American far-right movements, which seek to re-entrench social and economic hierarchies that benefitted white settlers.
On the basis of the orthodox line, Dimitrov argues that fascism represents the narrow interests of a small section of reactionary imperialists. In order to appeal to a mass base, he contends, fascists use demagoguery to manipulate the attitudes and actions of other classes. He notes, correctly, that fascists adapt their rhetoric to the specific conditions of each country and even to the specific conditions of various social strata. Nonetheless, I would argue that Dimitrov presents the appeal of fascist rhetoric as superficial. In other words, there is an underlying assumption that once the demagogic content is dispelled, the masses would then be available for communist organizing. In sum, Dimitrov does not examine the pull of available cultural or ideological materials—themselves grounded in historically specific material conditions—that make such rhetoric legible and persuasive.
Let us return to the text. Dimitrov contends that fascists gain a mass base by appealing to needs and demands unmet within bourgeois political systems and by crowding into the political terrain of the communists:

Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice, and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. Why do the German fascists, those lackeys of the big bourgeoisie and mortal enemies of Socialism, represent themselves to the masses as “Socialists,” and depict their accession to power as a “revolution”? Because they try to exploit the faith in revolution, the urge towards Socialism, which lives in the hearts of the broad masses of the toilers of Germany.³⁹

To summarize, he contends that fascists have gained a foothold in the masses because their promises meet the masses’ desire for economic justice. He then argues that fascism is by necessity unstable—it cannot meet the promises it makes because it cannot overcome the class contradictions inherent to capitalist accumulation. Thus, the anti-capitalist demagoguery of fascism is contradicted by its capitalist program.⁴⁰
Dimitrov appears confident that the contradiction between fascist demagoguery and its economic basis will dispel its grip on the masses. However, demagoguery, we should recall, is a form of political persuasion that appeals to the desires and the prejudices of its ostensive audience. Therefore, the appeal or persuasiveness of fascist rhetoric cannot be evaluated on a solely economic basis. Dimitrov himself points toward a countervailing aspect of fascist rhetoric that would displace merely economic criteria of success: nationalism.

Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists, but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments, as German fascism did, for instance, when it won the support of the masses by the slogan “Against the Versailles Treaty!”⁴¹

This passage epitomizes several problems with the Comintern’s position on nationalism during this period. Torkil Lauesen argues that during the 1930s the Comintern revised its position on nationalism in the interest of defending the Soviet Union, and in the belated recognition that the working classes of the imperialist core had been won over by chauvinism and opportunism (a belated recognition, because communists from Lenin onwards had underestimated the size and strength of the labor aristocracy).⁴² Thus, in the passage above, Dimitrov departs from Lenin’s position on nationalism and imperialism. Lenin had argued that imperialism is characterized by competition between imperialist countries for colonial holdings. By contrast, Dimitrov suggests that nationalist sentiments within the imperial core may be salvaged for popular front work despite their historical formation through imperialism. There is, however, no discussion of how salvaging imperialist nationalisms affects oppressed nations within the imperialist core. In the US, the popular front strategy, which permitted a degree of nationalist sentiment among the white working classes, asserted the fight for equal status for Black Americans rather than self-determination in the Black Belt.¹Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 33. Kelley documents the ramifications of this shift for communist organizing in Alabama in Hammer and Hoe. Then, near the conclusion of The Fascist Offensive, Dimitrov alleges that communism is opposed to both “bourgeois nationalism” and “national nihilism,” and thus the principled opposition to bourgeois nationalism does not permit communists to “sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad toiling masses.”⁴³ Here, the opposition of nationalism and national nihilism deflects from the actual opposition between nationalism and internationalism.
For our purposes, Dimitrov’s superficial reference to nationalism precludes a dialectical interpretation of fascist rhetoric, which would synthesize the fascist appeals to both anti-capitalist sentiments and nationalism. His work belies the assumption that the economic basis of fascism will ultimately dispel its demagogic promises, although he cautions that “fascism will not collapse automatically.”⁴⁴ But fascists do not merely exploit the “faith in revolution” or the “urge towards Socialism” in the masses, as if they are crowding out the Communist Party. Instead, fascists assert an entirely different theory of social change grounded in a national rebirth, in Griffin’s terms, “palingenetic ultra-nationalism.”⁴⁵ Griffin argues that ultranationalism presents a concept of nationalism

as a “higher” racial, historical, spiritual or organic reality. . . . Such a community is regarded by its protagonists as a natural order which can be contaminated by miscegenation and immigration, by the anarchic, unpatriotic mentality encouraged by liberal individualism, internationalist socialism, and by any number of “alien” forces allegedly unleashed by “modern” society, for example the rise of the “masses,” the decay of moral values, the “levelling” of society, cosmopolitanism, feminism, and consumerism.⁴⁶

Palingenetic ultranationalism also has a built-in explanation of its own failure: the natural order of the community is always under threat from external, alien forces. Within its own ideological parameters, each failure of the fascist program can be attributed to alien forces that block national rebirth. For example, the Nazis can mobilize anti-semitic conspiracy theories to attack ruling “elites” rather than the bourgeoisie, or to attack communists (“Judeo-Bolshevism”) for fomenting division, for undermining the supposed shared national interests between workers and the owners of the means of production.
In sum, Dimitrov’s discussion of social demagoguery remains a superficial account of how fascism appeals to the prejudices of its potential mass base. His brief discussion of nationalism sidesteps issues of racism and anti-semitism, sexism is broached only in a brief section on women’s work, and he makes only passing mention of eugenics.⁴⁷ There is, in the popular front strategy, an unwillingness to deal with the motivating prejudices of the popular base for fascism. I have distinguished between fascist rhetoric and fascist social demagoguery in order to emphasize how Dimitrov fails to account for the motivating prejudices of fascist movements.

III. Epilogue: The Wages of Whiteness

In the second, most extensive section of The Fascist Offensive, handling popular front strategies, Dimitrov observes: “in contradistinction to German fascism, which acts under anti-constitutional slogans, American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the constitution and ‘American democracy.’”⁴⁸ He attributes the difference to American parochialism, but does not explain the conditions or content of American parochialism.
The ideological differences between German fascism and American fascism are due to their different, specific historical and political circumstances. American far-right movements could, and some still do, frame themselves as the true custodians of the Constitution and democracy because the United States is a settler-colonial state, which has integrated elements of bourgeois democratic parliamentarianism and elements of white supremacism into its social, political, and economic institutions. Commenting on the failure of American fascist movements to gain a mass base in the 1930s, Sakai contends that “white settler colonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche. Having one, capitalist society didn’t yet need the other.”⁴⁹ Settlerism and fascism are, in his view, two types of “popular oppressor cultures.”
I define white settlerism as an ideological framework which privileges both white (male) entitlement to land (possession or dominion) over the colonized’s right to sovereignty and autonomy, and entitlements encapsulated in the wages of whiteness. When white settlerism or the social and political hierarchies entrenched in settler-colonial societies fall into crisis, or are perceived to have fallen into crisis, then far-right movements—which seek to re-entrench the political and social hierarchies of settler-state hegemony—gain traction. In what follows, I will briefly reconstruct the theoretical trajectory of this alternative revolutionary approach to understanding fascist and far-right movements.
As we have noted above, Dimitrov’s characterization of fascism seemingly accords with Lenin’s theory of imperialism, while nevertheless permitting a popular front strategy. In fact, Dimitrov’s discussions of imperialism leave out one crucial aspect: the formation of the labor aristocracy within imperialist nations. The concept of labor aristocracy captures how workers within the imperialist core receive a “wage” based on the superprofits expropriated from the workers of oppressed or colonial nations. Du Bois’ analysis of the wages of whiteness is motivated by a similar concern. I cannot fully explore the parallels between Lenin and Du Bois here. However, I believe that critics generally understand the compensation of the wages of whiteness or labor aristocracy to be “low,” and hence, not useful for understanding the social basis of far-right and fascist movements. I believe this general understanding is incorrect, although it may have a partial basis in the writings of Lenin and Du Bois themselves.
For both Lenin and Du Bois, during the period of 1914–1916, the concept of labor aristocracy contributes to understanding how parts of the working class threw their support behind World War I. Lenin seeks to explain the economic ground of social chauvinism and opportunism, and while Du Bois’ concern is similar, he argues additionally in “The African Roots of War” (1915) that the economics of imperialism are a factor in the formation of whiteness.⁵⁰ What I want to highlight here is how Lenin characterizes the “bribe” required to pay off the labor aristocracy for supporting imperialism. Imperialism is defined in part by imperialist countries—the “Great Powers”—living at the expense of the colonies. However, the partition of the world is completed, which provokes imperial competition and ultimately war in order to repartition the colonial territories. In “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (1916), he writes:

monopoly yields superprofits, i.e., a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world. The capitalists can devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of these superprofits to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance . . . between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries. . . . And how this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, “labour representatives” (remember Engels’s splendid analysis of the term), labour members of war industries committees, labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc., is a secondary question.⁵¹

Several of Lenin’s key writings from this period give the impression that he considers the labor aristocracy to be a narrow strata of workers, who receive a small bribe in terms of wages and social or political access. There is some inconsistency in his characterization of the monetary portion of the bribe. In the passage above, he observes that the labor aristocracy receives “not a small” portion of superprofits, but elsewhere he refers to this narrow strata of workers as getting “but morsels of the privileges of their ‘own’ national capital.”⁵² Lenin also contends that the bribe is temporary and unsustainable. Although the English labor aristocracy had been bribed for decades, he argues that it is “improbable, if not impossible,” given the contemporary challenges to the monopoly of finance capital and the conflagration of imperialist war, for numerous imperial countries to sustain their respective labor aristocracies.⁵³ Du Bois’ “The African Roots of War” provides an interesting contrast. While Lenin sees a “moribund” and “already dying” capitalism on the precipice, Du Bois argues that the extraction of wealth from the colonies is only beginning: the exploitation of African workers “would furnish to their masters a spoil exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of imperialists.”⁵⁴
In 1920, in “The Second Congress of the Communist International,” Lenin continues to maintain that opportunism in imperialist countries is grounded economically in superprofits derived from the exploitation of oppressed peoples. However, while he had previously treated the labor aristocracy as a narrow strata of the working class, in this text he avers that the economic returns of the exploitation of colonized and oppressed peoples affects the whole “culture of advanced countries.”⁵⁵ He writes:

The whole thing boils down to nothing but bribery. It is done in a thousand different ways: by increasing cultural facilities in the largest centres, by creating educational institutions, and by providing co-operative, trade union and parliamentary leaders with thousands of cushy jobs.⁵⁶

Despite the characterization of this transfer of wealth as “bribery,” Lenin now suggests that the social and economic formation of the labor aristocracy has deeper economic roots than he had previously anticipated. During the period of 1914–1916 the distribution of the wages of labor aristocracy was treated as a “secondary question,” which referred to points of political access and social status for a narrow, upper strata of the working class. In 1920, he attempts to ground the labor aristocracy within broader European culture and in social and economic conditions, and he suggests that these “wages” buy more than mere political access or social status; they also provide cultural and educational opportunities to this worker elite. Nevertheless, these passages do not develop a full portrait of the social and political ramifications of the formation of a permanent labor aristocracy. The Communist International did not subsequently take up a theory of labor aristocracy as a task. Indeed, developing such a theory and applying it to fighting fascism was deliberately sidestepped by the popular front strategy.⁵⁷
Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction mentions fascism only in passing. However, his account of the wages of whiteness remains a model for understanding how the hegemony that circulates around whiteness is formed. In Chapter 16, “Back to Slavery,” he argues that the struggle for abolition democracy, which followed Emancipation, was defeated by the formation of a white political identity that aligned the white working class with the white capitalist class. Summarizing the analysis of Chapter 16, which is more complex than I am able to present it here, Du Bois writes:

It must be remembered that the white group of labourers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the coloured schools.⁵⁸

There are numerous clear parallels here between Du Bois and Lenin’s analyses from 1920, when the latter mentions that part of the wage of labor aristocracy includes access to education and cultural institutions. Some critics of Du Bois take this passage to imply that the wages of whiteness are low. However, I believe this particular observation at this point in Black Reconstruction is temporally bounded to the emergence of a white labor aristocracy in the 1870s. In essays such as “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” Du Bois addresses how subsequently a much wider gulf between white workers and Black workers had emerged through developments in production and social-demographic change, which was then codified by disenfranchisement of the latter and the Color Bar.⁵⁹ Yet, Kevin Bruyneel identifies how Du Bois underestimates the wages of whiteness: by neglecting to situate Reconstruction in relation to the dispossession of Indigenous land and the white settlement of what is now the western United States, facilitated during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the General (or Dawes) Allotment Act of 1887. Bruyneel argues that, due to codified discrimination and violent intimidation against Black people through that period,

white settlers claimed significant benefit from this and other Homestead Acts. This meant that access, or the prospect of access, to land as property was a “wage” conferred to whiteness as a socioeconomic benefit with vital political and social meaning during the late nineteenth-century consolidation of the racial and colonial capitalist system of the United States.⁶⁰

Du Bois never quite brought settler-colonialism into focus, whether in Black Reconstruction or elsewhere; it remained a lacuna in his concept of the wages of whiteness. In the late 1960s, however, James Boggs—drawing on the work of Du Bois—linked the formation of the white worker elite to the failure of Reconstruction and the westward expansion of the US, while ultimately identifying this white worker elite as the “grass roots” base for fascism.⁶¹ How Boggs’ account of white settlerism and fascism places him at odds with the Black Panther Party’s embrace of the orthodox line and the popular front strategy is an argument to be made another day.

* * *

I have only sought to introduce and outline themes to a much larger and more complex work. We must begin critique somewhere in order to dispense with the certitudes and dogmas that surround the orthodox line on fascism. Once these are dispelled, we may begin to reconstruct the history of a critical, revolutionary anti-fascist theory that combats far-right movements within the context of North American settler-colonialism. I submit these notes in their incomplete and preliminary state for comradely criticism.

1. Shannon Clay et al., We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action (Oakland: PM Press, 2023), 3: “First founded in 1987, Anti-Racist Action was a militant, direct-action-oriented, radical left political movement active in the United States and Canada.”
2. Matthew N. Lyons defines the far-right as inclusive of “political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system.” See Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire, 2018, ii. Throughout this essay, I will refer to the far-right if I think it is important to suggest that a particular observation about fascist movements applies to the far-right as a whole, otherwise I will refer to fascism (which I define below).
3. Hamerquist recounts his political background in Don Hamerquist, A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist, ed. Luis Brennan (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2023). For histories of these groups see, respectively: Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization 1969–1986 (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); Hilary Moore and James Tracy, No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (San Francisco: City Lights, 2020); and Clay et al., We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action.
4. In May of 2024, Kersplebedeb and PM Press will be publishing an anthology of key texts for the three way fight, Xtn Alexander et al., eds., Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism (Oakland: PM Press, 2024).
5. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 1999).
6. Hamerquist describes this as the “transclass” character of fascism. I will also use this terminology at points. Regarding far-right recruitment across class and racial lines, see Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists.
7. Don Hamerquist, “Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, Second Edition (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2017), 28–29, my emphasis. In his contribution to Confronting Fascism, J. Sakai challenges Hamerquist’s claim that far-right movements hold anti-capitalist bona fides; instead, he argues that far-right movements exploit and modulate sexist and settlerist social structures and ideologies already present in North American societies to build insurgent street-level movements. He notes that fascist movements are “anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist.” See Sakai, “The Shock of Recognition,” 122.
8. Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, 253. “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism” is reproduced as an appendix to Insurgent Supremacists.
9. George Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and Unity of the Working Class (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 4. In the FLP edition, text for the former essay is based on an edition produced by Modern Publishers of Sydney (1935) and the latter is based on one from Lawrence and Wishart (1938). (This information was provided in correspondence with one of the editors).
10. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 94.
11. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 28.
12. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, 25th anniversary edition (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015), 31.
13. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 26. The term “palingenesis” is derived from the Greek palin (again, anew) and genesis (creation, birth), to signify a sense or rebirth or regeneration.
14. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, 246.
15. Joseph Fronczak, Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).
16. Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 33.
17. Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 160–161.
18. George Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 4.
19. Black Panther Party, “Call for a United Front Against Fascism,” The US Antifascism Reader, ed. Bill Mullen and Chris Vials (London ; New York: Verso Books, 2020), 269.
20. Compare Black Panther Party, “Call for a United Front Against Fascism,” 269 and Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and Unity of the Working Class, 5.
21. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 3.
22. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 5–6.
23. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 6.
24. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 6.
25. Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005), 94.
26. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 6.
27. Noel Ignatin, “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” Urgent Tasks, no. 4 (Summer 1978), 25.
28. Black Panther Party, “Call for a United Front Against Fascism,” 269.
29. Kathleen Cleaver, “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” The US Antifascism Reader, ed. Bill Mullen and Chris Vials (London ; New York: Verso Books, 2020), 264; 266.
30. Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 176.
31. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 208–209.
32. Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom, 208.
33. Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom, 210.
34. Cleaver, “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” 266.
35. Marx, The Civil War in France, 62.
36. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, xx.
37. For example, Vials asserts—despite writing after the heyday of Anti-Racist Action—that “the queer anti-fascisms of the 1980s and early 1990s [embodied in ACT UP and other groups] marked the last point in American history in which this discourse [anti-fascism] was used in a sustained, concentrated manner by a left-oriented social movement.” His claim only makes sense if we understand his analysis to focus exclusively on groups which attempted to exercise parliamentary pressure. See Haunted by Hitler, 232.
38. See John Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 1154.
39. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 7.
40. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 19.
41. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 7.
42. See Torkil Lauesen, The Global Perspective: Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018), 130–142.
43. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 66.
44. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 19.
45. See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 37: “Ultra-nationalism” means forms of nationalism “which ‘go beyond,’ and hence reject, anything compatible with liberal institutions or with the tradition of Enlightenment humanism which underpins them.”
46. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 37.
47. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, on sexism: 55–56; on the policy of sterilization: 10.
48. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive, 32.
49. Sakai, “The Shock of Recognition,” 130. We should be careful not to read this evocation of “need” as a repetition of the top-down view of fascism held by the orthodox line.
50. Du Bois threw his support behind World War I in 1919. Alberto Toscano undertakes a comparative reading of Du Bois and Lenin, while explaining Du Bois’ about face as the result of a “painful entanglement of two partially-overlapping colour lines: the one cutting through the US working class, the other dividing white and non-white labour globally.” See Toscano, “‘America’s Belgium’: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and the Origins of World War I,” Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 238–239.
51. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Collected Works, by V. I. Lenin, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 114–115. The essays I cite from Lenin are collected in the more accessible volume originally compiled by The Communist Working Circle in 1972 and reprinted with an introduction by Torkil Lauesen, V. I. Lenin, On Imperialism & Opportunism (Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2019).
52. V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 244, my emphasis.
53. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” 115–116.
54. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War (1915),” Monthly Review 24, no. 1 (1973): 34.
55. V. I. Lenin, “Second Congress,” Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 230.
56. “Second Congress,” 230.
57. Lauesen, The Global Perspective: Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance, 132.
58. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 573–574.
59. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” Selections from the Crisis, by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker, vol. 2, 1926–1934, Writings in Periodicals Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois (Millwood, N.Y: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1983), 698.
60. Kevin Bruyneel, Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2021), 62.
61. Boggs, however, saw American fascism as an exception to the typical functioning of fascist movements (namely, the former is grassroots while the latter is top down): “Fascism in the United States is therefore unique in that it is grass roots rather than from the top down. Today the Minute Men, America Firsters, White Citizens’ Councils, and the scores of other white organizations organized to defend the United States from the demands of blacks for justice are made up of workers, skilled and unskilled, who work every day alongside blacks in the shop and then night after night organize in the suburbs against these same blacks.” See James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 96.