What Is To Be Done?

Socialists must join the struggle against fascism. But too many struggle to admit the severity of the threat—or the reality of our power.

As we draw closer to an alarmingly close general election with high-stakes political consequences, Liberation Road has contributed to vigorous debates within the left about electoral politics, the threat of MAGA, and the role of socialists in the fight against fascism.

Now more than ever, US socialists need to cohere around a shared strategy for fighting fascism. Liberation Road has been heartened to participate in efforts to do just that. But too many socialists still downplay the fascist threat. Others admit it, but deny there is anything the socialist left can do about it. 

Socialists can and do have a vital role to play in the fight against MAGA. We were thrilled to participate in a joint panel with North Star Socialist Organization and DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus at the 2024 Socialism Conference in Chicago to discuss just that. Now we’re excited to continue that conversation tomorrow, Wednesday, October 16 at 8:00 PM Eastern in a live-streamed webinar hosted by Convergence Magazine.

An Inside/Outside approach to the Democratic Party and electoral politics

As Perry Bacon Jr. discussed in the Washington Post, fierce debates roiled the recent Socialism Conference about how socialists should relate to this year’s elections. I’m glad that Bacon ultimately aligned with the position outlined by Liberation Road, North Star and Socialist Majority in our trilateral panel, endorsing my remark that: “We’re in a process of struggle, unity, struggle with centrist Democrats. Let’s unite in November and the day after the election, let’s start struggling again.” 

Since 2016, Liberation Road has worked to strengthen a growing trend within the socialist left, uniting around this dual inside/outside strategy of unity and struggle within a broad pro-democracy front to defeat the far-right threat. This trend has long included other groups like CPUSA and the DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus, and has recently been strengthened by the emergence of another DSA caucus, Groundwork, and the founding of the a North Star Socialist Organization, whose analysis of the moment aligns with ours. 

While our groups continue to have differences, we are united in our understanding of the fascist threat and the need to unite within a broad coalition to defeat it, even as we work to build the power of the left. Beyond explicitly socialist organizations, this cohering “Block and Build” orientation is increasingly shared by many left-progressive groups and coalitions, from the Working Families Party to Rising Majority. 

Unfortunately, rather than strengthening left efforts in the struggle against fascism, some socialists still struggle to come to terms with the threat we face. Some continue to advocate electoral abstentionism or symbolic protest votes, while others punt on electoral questions entirely. Take the debates currently unfolding within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). While the Groundwork and SMC caucuses have developed a joint general election program under the slogan “Socialism Beats Fascism,” it is fiercely opposed by an abstentionist motion put forward by a different caucus. Ultimately, DSA’s national leadership declined to endorse either position, with the organization failing to offer its members and supporters any clear guidance on how or if to vote in November. As Max Elbaum noted in a sharp polemic first published in our newsletter, this effectively “punts” on one of the most important strategic questions of this political period. 

“If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and you think it’s a pig, it’s a pig.” - Gloria Steinem

Calling a Fascist Spade a Fascist Spade

Elbaum’s article provoked a fiery response from Ashley Smith of the Tempest Collective, another group his piece singled out for criticism. Smith’s response focused on the manifold failures and limitations of the centrist Democratic establishment—a point about which most socialists are clear. Remarkably, however, in a lengthy rebuttal exceeding 4,000 words, Smith devoted only a scant few paragraphs to discussing Trump or MAGA. When he did, his remarks were contradictory. “To be clear, Trump is no fascist, and the Republican Party is not a fascist one,” he wrote in one paragraph. In the very next: “We share with everyone in the U.S. the fear of the threat Trump and these fascists pose and we are wholly dedicated to fighting them.” Yet this commitment to fighting Trump does not apparently include helping elect the one candidate who has a chance of defeating him at the ballot box. This would seem to confirm rather than refute Elbaum’s argument.

Elsewhere, Tempest members Dan Davison and Sacha Marten have written more extensively about Trump and Trumpism. Alas, these remarks are even more confusing. Not only do they claim that Trump is not a fascist, they go on to assert—remarkably—that he’s a centrist! If this assertion immediately seems implausible, they go on to explain that they are not using the word “centrist” in the usual sense of the term. Here’s what they write:

As most readers have probably gathered, we’re using “centrist” very differently from its normal, contemporary meaning of someone with “moderate” political views positioned somewhere between left and right. Instead, we’re using “centrist” in a sense inspired by its older Marxist meaning of someone whose political positions stand or oscillate between being reformist and being revolutionary. In the early interwar period, centrism in this sense was perhaps most closely associated with the short-lived International Working Union of Socialist Parties (IWUSP), often called the “Two-and-a-Half International” to denote its position midway between the reformist Second International and the revolutionary Third International.

Having repurposed “centrist” to mean “socialists standing midway between reform and revolution,” Tempest then take us through one more tortuous twist of language and logic. Today’s far right, they argue, is divided between reformist and revolutionary wings—the former a hard-right restorationist movement that nevertheless accepts some pretense of democracy, while the latter fundamentally rejects popular sovereignty and democratic rule. Only the latter, they explain, can properly be called “fascist,” and Trump occupies a position midway between the two. Thus: “[just] as historical “centrists” stood or oscillated between the reformist and revolutionary Left, Trump stands or oscillates between the “reformist” and “revolutionary” far right.”

Why all these contortions of language and logic? The authors have just conceded that today’s Republican party has been taken over by two hard-right currents—one seeking to roll back the 20th century in order to restore a neoconfederate “white republic,” the other striving to overthrow the republic entirely in order to replace it with a new form of fascist rule. The candidate running for president has managed to combine these two currents into a united front that is a hair’s breadth away from seizing state power. To call the leader of this dangerous, far-right front a “centrist” undercuts the severity of the threat level that the authors’ own analysis has just made apparent. Indeed, that seems to be the point. Far from clarifying the terms of our analysis and strategy, such sophistry obscures the terrain and its tasks.

redhope, “Fight Fascism” (2008) / CC BY-NC 2.0

Refusing Left Fatalism in the Face of Fascism

Luckily, more and more socialists understand that we are in a high-stakes struggle against a very real fascist threat. Another DSA caucus, Bread and Roses, recently published the transcript of a discussion on the question: Is MAGA a Fascist movement? The consensus among participants was yes, with only one dissenter, who hastened to add: “Which is of course not to say that Trump is not dangerous or that a second Trump presidency wouldn’t be terrible for the labor movement, for immigrants, for women, and so on; likewise it would certainly embolden far-right activists again, and lead to more right-wing violence.” 

I am heartened that members of Bread and Roses largely unite with our understanding of the nature and severity of the far-right threat. But that makes it all the more confusing that Bread and Roses has adopted a “Switzerland” stance on the internal struggle within DSA, neglecting to endorse either position put forward by competing national caucuses on voting or not voting for Kamala Harris. This is baffling. If the caucus members all agree a second Trump presidency would be devastating, why not call for doing everything we can to forestall this possibility?

One interesting potential reason for this reticence was articulated by Jane Slaughter in the caucus’s roundtable discussion. Referencing Liberation Road’s “Block, Broaden, Build” position paper on the elections, Slaughter stated:

The left-wing organization Liberation Road argues that allying with any and all in a popular front to defeat Trump will actually make the left stronger, because the left will be the best builders of the anti-fascist movement and people will be drawn to us. In my opinion this is fantasy—the left is too small for most people to notice whether we are the best builders.

When I read this, I found myself surprised by Slaughter’s fatalism. In my own experience helping found and strengthen left-led, democratic mass membership organizations (a.k.a. independent political organizations, or IPOs) in North Carolina, left and progressive organizers have very much managed to build a mass base, gain traction, and play an increasing role within the anti-fascist front. As Lead Organizer at Durham For All, I helped run campaigns that linked widespread voter contact with deep organizing—not just electing candidates to office, but connecting those efforts to ongoing base-building and leadership development, as well as to issue fights that won major victories around everything from participatory budgeting to community-based alternatives to policing. 

These and other local efforts eventually scaled up into a statewide organization, the Carolina Federation, which is just one of several left or progressive state-level IPO projects that are holding an increasingly large portion of state-level voter engagement efforts. And while my experience is specific to North Carolina, we were inspired in our efforts by powerful IPOs elsewhere, like Virginia New Majority and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. While many of these organizations are not explicitly socialist, they are all far to the left of the centrist Democratic establishment, understand the need for a complex process of unity and struggle with and against the latter, and are growing increasingly skilled at this complex process. Meanwhile, DSA’s own electoral experiences show it is possible to run candidates and win elections as a socialist organization. 

Embracing Socialist Protagonism

This is not to deny the point that the left (whether socialist or social movement) is still far too fragmented and far too small. Indeed, it is precisely because we are small that we are obliged to work within an uneasy front with centrist forces. 

But neither can we use our relative smallness as a shield against taking action. As every good organizer knows, there is a (false) comfort in fatalism—if we believe we are powerless to have any impact, we don’t have to try to do anything difficult. When we organize, our work is precisely to help others overcome that inertia, facing the more frightening but ultimately more liberating truth that our actions and struggles can have an impact. 

The socialist left must apply this lesson to ourselves in the fight against fascism. We can’t afford to passively watch the electoral struggle against MAGA play out, confident in the false pessimism that there is nothing we can really do about it. Nor can we afford the false optimism of dreaming about third party victories or other fantasies that overinflate our position. The theorist Marta Harnecker used to remind us of the need to cultivate “protagonism”—the ability of ordinary people to act as the subjects of our collective history, rather than passive objects to which it happens. As socialists, we should embrace a grounded protagonistic approach to this political moment—one that is both clear-eyed about the threat, and balanced in our assessment of what we can and cannot do to address it.

If you are able, I hope you will join us tomorrow night for more discussion on “Marx over MAGA: The Socialist Left in the Fight Against Fascism.” Click here to register for the call. 

In Solidarity,

Bennett 

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We hope you can join us for more conversation! Please join us at “Marx over MAGA: the Socialist Left in the Fight Against Fascism.” Wednesday October 16th @ 8:00 PM Eastern (5:00 PM Pacific).

Bennett Carpenter (they/them) is a queer Southern organizer, trainer and movement strategist. A member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road, they have extensive experience in labor, community and electoral organizing.