A vision for radical recomposition: post-neoliberal and anti-fascist perspectives
Daphne Lawless, 28 February 2025 (revised 14 May 2025)
One of my political heuristics is that New Zealand politics is five years behind the United States. If that's true, then the broad Left has five years to prevent an actively reactionary (as opposed to conservative) regime taking power, and we have to look closely at the USA to see what’s coming down the pipeline.
What is Trumpism-Muskism? Is it fascism?
The first thing to say is that, although Elon Musk and the “tech oligarchy” who have infiltrated and are currently dominating the Trump administration have extremely reactionary beliefs which pretty much coincide with classic descriptions of fascism, there is a contradiction between their multi-billionaire class base and that of fascism, which is the downwardly-mobile middle class and other atomised social layers. Musk’s hostility to the federal bureaucracy and “woke” in general is shared with this layer; but the Republican Party grassroots are beginning to find out to their consternation that taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy means job losses, cuts in social security, even deportations of their loved ones. This contradiction is beginning to show itself in hostile receptions to Republican congresspeople at town halls.
I therefore feel it’s not strictly correct to describe the movement led by Trump as a “fascist” movement per se, despite the beliefs of its leading members being very close to classical fascism. More appropriate parallels might be:
a) The Franco regime in Spain, which was based on a reactionary coalition including fascists alongside monarchists, traditional Catholics, military leaders and conservative technocrats.
b) The Pinochet regime in Chile, which similarly downsized the administrative state and removed controls on capital while enacting savage repression;
c) The regimes of Louis Bonaparte/Napoleon III (France) or Juan Perón (Argentina) which were essentially personalist authoritarian regimes (i.e. they relied on a personality cult around one figure, who might be extremely erratic in ideology).
In what follows I’ll prefer to use “Trumpism-Muskism” as a shorthand to describe the movement embodied by the Trump-Musk alliance on a global scale (which makes it a Trump-Musk-Putin-Netanyahu alliance, at least.)
In any case, all these regimes (including actual fascist ones) bear out the Marxist analysis (first applied to Napoleon III in 18th Brumaire) that such populist-authoritarian movements come out of a stalemate in the class struggle. Opposing social forces cannot lay a knockout blow on each other and are bogged down in exhausting struggle. The appeal of personalism is that the Leader acts as a “referee”, cuts through all the muck and is able to impose a settlement out of sheer will.
This is borne out by the overall feeling of “exhaustion” and “paralysis” in US politics. The “checks and balances” of the US constitution (which is, at this stage in history, essentially unamendable) have led to neither Right-wing nor liberal administrations being able to impose their will on society. Social movements, including #MeToo and the “Black Lives Matter” uprising of 2020, have shaken the system but not been able to sustain themselves or impose their will. The Supreme Court has traditionally acted as the “referee/tiebreaker” in such a situation, but its increasingly open takeover by reaction has led it to lose legitimacy among a large section of the population. Another factor in this exhaustion is, of course, the exhaustion of the broad liberal-left after years of having to defend the Biden regime’s immoral support for the genocide in Gaza (another word for this might be “moral injury”).
The second thing to emphasise is that anti-woke is a form of class warfare, both from above and “horizontally”, against the Professional Middle Class. “Diversity, equality and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives from above, and movements from below such as #MeToo and BLM, have significantly impinged on the ability of US capitalists to discipline their workforce. COVID restrictions did so even more, with the growth of “working from home”. And of course traditional unionised worker militancy also became more effective in the post-COVID years of labour shortages.
Amanda Marcotte discusses these issues, and her conclusion is worth quoting
Because the desk workers of Silicon Valley are middle class, they don't rate much sympathy in the current political discourse, which is far more focused on the partisan tug-of-war for working-class voters. But it's playing into the hands of oligarchs to reject the needs of middle class workers. The real battle is between working people, whether college-educated or not, and the hyper-wealthy, who want to suck up all the money for themselves and leave the people who do the actual labor behind.
Marcotte here puts her finger on an issue which has plagued the radical Left as long as I’ve been involved, which is: do skilled white-collar workers count as “working class”, i.e. the subject of communist politics as it has been traditionally been described? Her distinction between “working class” and “working people” in my opinion fudges that question and gives too much away to the people she’s arguing against. But this is the same observation that I made almost a decade ago, in “Against Conservative Leftism”:
The fact remains that – while strikes and other traditional forms of workers' struggle are at an all-time low – uprisings “from below” are not only continuing, but becoming more intense, under the guise of “identity politics”.
John Ganz also makes this impeccably materialist argument:
In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary. The process is analogous to what Marx thought was taking place in the industrial capitalist economy but transposed into the digital realm: to accumulate wealth, the bourgeoisie needed factories, and the factories needed workers, but the need for workers and their exploitation created a mass, militant proletariat.
So what we have so far is:
a) A mass movement with a classically fascist base but with an oligarchic capitalist leadership;
b) This leadership is conducting class warfare, not only against white-collar workers under the banner of “anti-woke”, but against other fractions of the ruling class who still support the globalised neoliberal order.
The Left response: paralysis, programme, and parasitism
Here we are reaching what I consider one of the vital points. As I predicted again in 2016, the Conservative Left (and a lot of the other tendencies in the activist Left) are paralysed in response to Trumpism-Muskism because they, in fact, approve of a large proportion of Trump’s platform. In 2016, I summed up the programmatic basis of Conservative Leftism in this way:
1. CONSERVATIVE ANTI-IMPERIALISM;
2. CONSERVATIVE POPULISM;
3. ANTI-RATIONALISM (or perhaps “intellectual populism”).
These are precisely the three bases on which parts of the contemporary Left find their program shared by Trumpism-Muskism. There is no pleasure in being proved right a decade too late.
Firstly, Trumpist attacks on “DEI” or “woke” are expressed in pretty much the same language as Conservative Left attacks on “identity politics”. It doesn’t matter that these politics (in their most potent form, #MeToo and BLM) have been significant vehicles of social progress for working people over the last decade. The Conservative Left do not see white-collar workers as workers at all – but as a parasitic class (the “PMC”) who accrue not only material wealth but social status (“virtue”) at the expense of the “real” working class, i.e. the traditional industrial proletariat. See this classic book review for a demolition of such ideas.
The kernel of truth in these arguments is that the “PMC” are, indeed, the social base of “woke” – which is why Trumpism-Muskism and Conservative Leftism both want to destroy this. The “social contract” upon which neoliberalism stabilised in the 1980s was for the traditional working class to be crushed and atomised, in return for a layer of traditionally oppressed people (women, queers, racialized people, disabled people) to be allowed to rise into the professional/managerial classes through anti-discrimination procedures. The belief of the “tech oligarchs” is that the rise of artificial intelligence will render most white collar labour redundant within 5-10 years, so this class can be liquidated (like Thatcher did to the miners, or Stalin did to the kulaks) and with it, traditional race/gender hierarchies can be re-established (including, for example, their right to sexually harass workers).
Ironically, the people who hate and rail against the “woke” PMC most are themselves podcasters, writers, journalists and academics – i.e. other PMC members. We should not be surprised; Pol Pot was an engineer. To some extent, my analysis of “gender critical” (TERF) politics applies: reactionary politics stems from those who had a little privilege and are seeing it under threat from the “undeserving”. But it may also just be that criminals and abusers are going to ditch their professed politics in favour of one which promises that their crimes and abuses won’t be punished. The Left-wing male writer accused of sexual harassment who goes “anti-woke”/“critical support to Trump” is now an established trope, à la Russell Brand.
Secondly, Trump is fulfilling the long-standing demand of the radical Left of “dismantling American empire”. His track record over the first few months of his second term would get “critical support” from any left-wing campist:
a) geopolitical rapprochement with Russia, abandonment of support for Ukraine and hostility to the other NATO powers;
b) dismantling institutions of foreign influence and “soft power” including the Pentagon and USAID (which did, among other things, provide cover for CIA operations);
c) rejection of free trade, the central tenet of globalized neoliberalism;
d) general antipathy to “America” as a concept and to the institutions (the Constitutions, “checks and balances” etc.).
The flipside of this is that, due to Trump’s extreme selfishness and mental degeneration, he often agrees with whoever talked to him last/flattered or bribed him the most, and might have an unpredictable change of heart on any particular foreign policy issue, especially if it allows him to “make a deal”. For example, on his recent trip to the Middle East he increasingly alarmed the Israeli government by negotiating hostage releases and ending sanctions on Syria without their go-ahead. But whether terrible or “good by accident”, Trump’s foreign policy is a logical extension of his contempt for all the institutions of US hegemony, neoliberal order, and constitutional democracy, and his appetite to simply override them.
This is an object of envy for some of the Conservative Left who share this contempt. As the Three Way Fight collection noted, the radical Left was drastically disoriented in 2001 when the biggest blow to US empire in a long time was struck by reactionary theocratic terrorists – which led to a nasty outbreak of “Red-Brown” collaborationism. Similarly, the apparatus of US empire is currently being sabotaged from within by tech oligarchs and domestic fascists – and with similar disorienting results for the Left.
The CEO of the fascist social media platform Gab, Andrew Torba, has said, “Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular Western globalist empire.” If you replaced “secular” with “neoliberal/capitalist”, that could be precisely a campist/Conservative Leftist attitude to the Ukrainian struggle against occupation. It is also extremely similar to the view expressed on a British left blog at the time of Brexit, suggesting that Eastern Europeans deserved no solidarity because they “scabbed” on the Warsaw Pact. Any Western leftist who calls for “immediate peace” in Ukraine probably knows full well that the effect of this would be what happened to Czechoslovakia after Munich 1938 – partition followed soon after by total dismemberment under an authoritarian regime hostile to the country’s very right to exist. And they don’t care, because Eastern Europeans are about as “real” to them as Palestinians are to your average pro-Israel liberal; they are expected to suffer under occupation for the sake of Westerners’ preferred geopolitical order.
A liberal on Bluesky commented: “most tankies have the same sort of politics as communist parties do in eastern europe: a kind of bitter nostalgia”. And of course bitter nostalgia – including hostility to any political subjects which have become prominent during the era of neoliberalism, which includes white collar knowledge workers, trans people, and former Soviet/Warsaw Pact nations – precisely describes the program of Trumpism-Muskism.
The extent to which this is due to the influence of the Russian state is overstated by many liberals, but certainly non-zero. The Russian state has had probably more influence turning “Left-wing” writers/journalists/artists to a campism which outright denies atrocities and genocides than it has on the tech oligarchs and the ideological fascists who are making the running right now. So it’s probably messed up “our movement” more than it has broader society. Nonetheless, those on the Left who have dreamed of a breakup of NATO and “the West” more broadly speaking may not be prepared for the consequences of the future where the Russian state formally makes an alliance with a United States led by Trump, who said recently that the European Union was set up to “screw” the US. Or, what happens if – in response to this – the EU moves closer to “socialist” China. Campist politics would suddenly mean nothing at all in such a situation.
A third axis of programmatic agreement is “crankery”, “woo”, or “anti-science”. The rise of Left-wing populism in the wake of Occupy made no serious attempt to combat conspiracy theory/anti-scientific health beliefs, of the type which are now right at the heart of the Trump administration, in the person of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Again, this is a factor I predicted in “Against Conservative Leftism”, but of course it massively exploded due to COVID. Anti-scientific beliefs, like conspiracy theories and the anti-rationalism inherent in fascism itself, are a reification of defeat – but also a symptom of capitalist decadence in itself. It’s not just the “gullible base” who believes this nonsense – Elon Musk really seems to believe in the “woke mind virus” and that there’s a button he can press somewhere in the Deep State to turn it off. Decadent late capitalism has thrown off the belief in science and objective reality that healthy early capitalism needed to gain power (as Marx noted).
Alongside programmatic agreement as a reason for Left-wing paralysis is parasitism. The radical Left have long become parasitical on liberal movements and mainstream politics, by which I mean that, rather than building an independent base and politics, they are dependent on the very institutions of neoliberalism that they attack:
a) Parasitical in organisation. The leadership of the radical Left and social networks have long been based in academia and as full-time organisers for NGOs (including bureaucratized unions). They have therefore mainly relied for their material support, not on the working class, but the very institutions which they aim to critique. This has led to a uniquely “irresponsible” politics – in academia in particular, radicals have been allowed (even encouraged) to engage in ultra-left theory and discourse, to the extent that it never actually impacts on reality in other than the most nebulous way. At best, this is a utopian socialism of the form that Marx and Engels would have recognized rather than a reflection of the actually-existing movement. It’s worth noting that the best radical academics, such as Judith Butler, have (like Marx) based their theory on what is happening in practice at the grassroots that the mainstream can’t or won’t focus on. It’s also interesting to note that this phenomenon of a “permanent and pensioned opposition” which is not motivated to create a practical programme was something noted by George Orwell in World War II.
b) Parasitical in politics. The energy of the radical Left in the US has focused on the Democratic Party and the institutions of neoliberalism – either “putting pressure” on them from the Left, or seeking their abolition/replacement. This is the embodiment of politics based on “Murc’s Law: Only Democrats Have Agency”. The reaction to rise of fascism, accordingly, is to (a) blame “the Dems”; (b) demand that “the Dems” (whose politics, let’s remember, are said to have led inexorably to the rise of fascism) “do something about it” or else dissolve and vanish. The contradiction should be obvious.
Ironically, this resembles an inverted version of the anti-PMC argument made above. But I am trying to argue that there isn’t really a PMC in the sense that the Conservative Left argue: that white-collar workers are a different layer from academics, podcasters and other professional “intellectuals” (in Gramsci’s sense), and it is this latter layer who are the basis of an “irresponsible politics” on the radical Left.
This parasitism is expressed in the political equivalent of Jacques Lacan’s “hysteric’s discourse”, in which (as Slavoj Žižek explains it) one party makes a series of demands on another, without the expectation (or even possibility) that they can be fulfilled; the purpose of the demand is establish a relationship between “hysteric” and “master” which gives the former their identity. Thus, in broad terms, the US radical Left are defined entirely by their opposition to the Democratic Party and neoliberal institutions, which renders them either incapable of combatting fascism (except through "making demands on the Dems”) or, worse, critically supporting what the fascist movement does insofar as it disrupts the neoliberal institutions, or in online parlance “owns the libs”. As the Spartacists are fond of saying, program generates theory; and the program of single-minded anti-liberalism leads to a theory of simple denial that fascism is a danger in itself.
This paralysis is nothing more or less than the fulfilment of what I wrote in “Against Conservative Leftism”:
the activist Left has held by default to a position of trying to “put the toothpaste back in the tube” - that is to return to pre-neoliberal political and social structures. This has sabotaged the movement's ability to deal with the new social forces created by neoliberal globalisation. Even worse... it renders the movements incapable of effectively fighting right-wing anti-neoliberal forces – including xenophobia, conspiracy theory, and actual fascism.
Then, who’s Left?
Generally the serious opposition to Trumpism/Muskism in the US is embodied by two tendencies. The most ideologically close to Fightback are those radical groups (mainly anarchist) who have adopted a Three Way Fight analysis, where fascism is explicitly seen as a separate phenomenon to the neoliberal state. These also generally have an excellent anti-campist analysis, support Ukraine and Palestine, etc.
However, even these are prone to a certain “Two-Way Fight” tendency, in that they (wishfully) overestimate how much the neoliberal state institutions have been damaged by the current fascist attack from within, leading to premature declarations that Liberalism Is Dead, and that Becoming An Anarchist (or a communist?) is the only possible response. Some of us might remember a similar point of view among New Zealand socialists who, 20 years ago, decreed the final death of social democracy, which of course came back to life in the era of Corbyn or Sanders; although that political current was pummelled in ideology and organisation, its material base never went away. Indications that rumours of the death of liberal democracy are possibly exaggerated are shown by the (uneven) resistance of state governments and the courts to Trumpism-Muskism, in the face of which it has had to take a few steps back. Despite the readiness of many establishment centrists and liberals to surrender, Gleichschaltung is far from complete in the US.
The other and significantly larger tendency is what I call Liberals (and Social Democrats) Who Mean It. This tendency is characterised by a call for a renewal of the institutions of US liberal democracy, along the lines of the New Deal or even Reconstruction – calls for a “Third Republic” or even a constituent assembly. They tend to be very much YIMBY and – while rejecting the blanket hostility of the US Left to the Democratic Party – are harshly critical of the Biden regime’s failures over Palestine and of the passivity of the Democratic establishment in the face of Trumpism-Muskism. They are strongly in favour of queer and trans rights and have (belatedly) realised that the Left’s case for open borders is more urgent than ever in an era when immigration control forces increasingly act as Trump’s Gestapo. To their credit, they understand that there is no going back to Obama-era neoliberalism any more than the “RETVRN” fantasies of the Conservative Left or the fascists. The dialectic of history works forwards, not backwards. The “Liberal Currents” website gives an overview of this tendency.
Although this analysis may look US-centric, such is the nature of global politics today. Trumpism-Muskism is international. Supporters of the attempted auto-coup by South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol carried signs with Trump’s slogan Stop The Steal. In Aotearoa, Brian Tamaki of the fascistic Destiny “Church” has eagerly suggested in interviews that he should become to Christopher Luxon what Elon Musk is to Donald Trump.
A lot of ink has been spilled on Destiny Church’s turn to open confrontation/
intimidation of queer/trans people. But this in itself is nothing new – it was what they did at their last “high point” in 2005, when civil unions and sex work law reform were the live issues. What seems to be new now is Brian Tamaki’s interest in forming a legitimate fascist street-fighting force, probably more along the lines of the “Proud Boys” than Hitler’s SA. His pro-Israel demonstrations have accelerated into actually challenging the Palestine movement to physical combat.
There is a global anti-campist/anti-capitalist Left. Fightback is part of it alongside journals such as New Politics, the majority of opinion in the “official” Fourth International, and writers with mainstream popularity such as Naomi Klein (not the other Naomi) and George Monbiot. But it is marginalised.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, among what you might call the radical or anti-capitalist Left, the simple fact is that campist politics dominates and is the “common sense”. The “People Against All Imperialisms” open letter against campist intellectual Vijay Prashad triggered a massive backlash and failed to accomplish its goals. Even among those without explicit campist politics, it was considered impermissible to make this a line of division in Left-wing politics; very similarly in the way in which Fightback’s attempt to even have the debate on Syria was rejected in Organise Aotearoa in 2020.
Aotearoa also has its quotient of “Liberals Who Mean It”, concentrated in the local YIMBY/urbanist movement. But here, the blind spot of the movement is – not so much a rejection of mass action – but an incomprehension of why it might be necessary, as opposed to working to get the elites to see reason. The current government, with former Transport Minister Simeon Brown throwing speed limits and cycle lanes in the trash bin for purely ideological reasons, has hopefully woken some ideas up about the interest of the ruling classes in facts and evidence. We’d probably best hope that they understand the need to politically win working people to urbanist/YIMBY politics before we get our own RFK Jrs in government, or before the institutions they’ve been working within are simply abolished by our own “DOGE”.
Increasingly, politics is dividing up – not necessarily between the Left, liberals, conservatives, fascists, etc. – but between those who support and those who oppose Trumpism-Muskism. Its supporters include fascists, tech oligarchs, “reactionary centrists” (of the “anti-woke” kind) and Red-Browns/conservative Leftists. These are all the groups who think the big issue with neoliberalism is actually what was right with it, which is also the Communist Manifesto’s vision of how capitalism was historically progressive – the way it broke down national, ethnic, and gender borders. They are relieved that Trump is bringing back nationalism and recentring white cishet native-born men and factory work as the subjects of history. Traditionalist Catholics and big fans of Joe Stalin can join hands over the principle that “woke liberals and global capitalists have ruined society”.
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards is a fascinating account of how the new oligarchy have realised this and are trying to roll back the “progressive” side of neoliberalism.The blunder of the Conservative Left is thus to abandon the dialectic of neoliberalism, to align themselves with this movement. Conversely and ironically, YIMBY liberals who are full-throatedly for open borders and the urban lifestyle are probably going to want to fight fascism much harder than self-described "socialists" who fetishise suburban or rural lifestyles and "traditional" communities – even if their preferred means of doing so may not be effective.
Where do we come in? A programme of proactivity
This is where the idea of a new, future-focused movement based on the self-activity of workers can come in (including the white-collar workers often lumped in under the “PMC”). The simple, material, Marxist point is that the working class (as broadly conceived in the era of immaterial labour) have the power of independent action to change social reality, regardless of big capital and the State, should they choose to organise for it.
Sectarianism between anti-fascist Leftists/anarchists and “liberals who mean it” complicates the ability to cohere this alternative political subject. When the Left says that fascism triumphed because of liberal complicity/fecklessness, or liberals argue for the horseshoe theory that Leftism opened the door for fascism, both reject the Three Way Fight analysis that fascism is a real, independent social force, with an agency outside what liberals or Leftists might do. The lessons of Stalin’s Third Period in Germany shouldn’t have to be re-learned in real time.
This requires reconstituting a radical political project on a programmatic basis, rather than a sectarian basis. And by programme, we have to include how we get there, as well as where we’re going.
For example: we argue for the low-carbon, intensified-housing, 15-minute city that liberal YIMBYs want. But we have to also argue that we are not going to get there under a capitalist oligarchy which is perfectly happy to burn the planet with fossil fuels. We won’t get there by working through a system which no longer cares about evidence and will fire its intellectuals the second they become inconvenient. Only people taking concrete action in communities and worksites, either against bad politics or directly enacting good politics, can ensure this change – even though building such organisation might be very hard. And in contrast, “bottom-up” urbanism (working people who can actually “make things happen” in dialogue with technical expertise) is the only way to avoid the kind of top-down planning failures which blighted the “urbanist” projects of the 1950s-1970s.
Similarly, a liberal (or a Ukrainian, for that matter) disgusted with the US’s betrayal of Ukraine (by Biden’s pusillanimity as much by Trump’s disinterest, malice and contempt) can be shown that this is inevitable where mutual security against hostile neighbours relies on the best interests/power gains of one or more big imperial states. We can also point out that the logic of what Russia is doing to Ukraine is exactly the same as what Israel does to Palestine; imperialism is imperialism, and only internationalist bottom-up solidarity is an alternative.
The insistence on “how we get there” is also significant when turned against the Conservative Left. Essentially, no matter how much they posture as “hard communists”, the horizon of change for such people is simply tough-guy social democracy – a more or less authoritarian state, with closed borders, “giving” the masses consumer goods and services, rather than a Marxian vision of working-class self-activity. The People’s Republic of China with a human face, if you will. Note also that the campist view of geopolitics assumes that there is no such thing as independent grassroots activity; everything is a chess move by one geopolitical actor or other.
Conservative Leftism, like fascism, is essentially a politics of irresponsibility. One kernel of truth in the argument that “neoliberalism led to fascism” is that neoliberalism insists on individual responsibility for your own situation, while depriving the individual of any political agency. Thatcher’s mantra of “There Is No Alternative” was embodied in the “no choice” politics of the 1990s – vote for whoever you like, the same thing happens. Modern fascism, arising from online swamps such as 4chan, relies on the seductive promise that you no longer need to be responsible – you can be as nasty, antisocial, bigoted, even sexually abusive as you like, and no-one will be able to do anything about it. It is Trump’s mantra of total impunity for any crimes if you swear fealty to him, which is leading to the more crooked Democratic politicians going openly MAGA.
In this context, the organisational parasitism described above is also a form of “irresponsibility”. We must argue strongly for an independent working-class politics, and demonstrate that a politics which is based on taking the neoliberal institutions’ money while spitting rhetorical fire against the neoliberal institutions is only going to lead to utopianism at best, and a jaded cynicism which shrugs at fascism in the worst case.
The only way out of this toxic dialectic is a return to a politics of self-activity where individual and collective pro-social/responsible behaviour results in measurable improvements of quality of life. This was Marx’s vision for how the proletariat would become worthy of being the ruling class, and this can simply not happen under neoliberalism nor under fascism.
Fightback offers the following sets of “oppositions” as basic principles to guide the formation of a program for the current era:
a) Anti-capitalist/workers’ self-activity;
b) Anti-fascist/Three Way Fight;
c) Anti-campist/internationalist;
d) Anti-obscurantist/pro-science;
e) Anti-“anti-woke” (pro-queer/trans, decolonial, feminist);
f) Anti-sectarian/agreement based on program rather than self-description;
g) Eco-urbanist.
Although this might look like a big list of “anti”s, the fundamental axis is a proactive rather than reactive politics; a politics which breaks out of the “hysteric’s discourse” of denouncing group A or demanding that group B do something, in favour of proposing self-activity (and hopefully following through). And crucially, it is a politics which can appeal to or engage in dialogue with communists, socialists, anarchists, and “Liberals Who Mean It”, without compromising on its basic anti-capitalism.
Conclusion
The rise of global fascism may very well lead to a death blow to liberal democracy – which will, despite the fond dreams of the sectarian Left, also mean death to their project. The activist Left have become parasitic on the institutions of liberal democracy, and when the dog dies the fleas also die. In such a situation, only those tendencies which “go MAGA”, or agree to be a harmless token opposition (like the Communist Party in Putin’s Russia), will survive.
But there is no going back to the neoliberalism which led us here either. A Liberal Who Means It who says “every billionaire is a policy failure” has to question their support for the system which naturally creates billionaires. The only way out is through. The current crisis offers hope for an ideological recomposition/new political subject based on the very best principles which classical liberalism shared with Marxian communism and anarchism at their beginning. There will be both self-described liberals and self-described socialists who will frankly prefer lining up with Trumpism-Muskism than with such a political project.
Fightback’s continued existence will be justified by the extent that we can present the vision of a post-neoliberal and anti-fascist ideological recomposition around internationalism, liberty, sustainability, solidarity and workers’ self-activity and make it relevant to all anti-fascist forces, ranging from anarchists to “liberals who mean it”. The self-described Left, let alone the Marxist Left, are no longer our sole constituency, and to the extent that they offer “critical support” to Trumpism-Muskism and its non-American allies, may now be our enemies.