Fascism is upon us; fascism has always been upon us.
In 2024, fascism features prominently in political conversations: in the mainstream, threats of its imminence are used to coerce two-party voter engagement in the impending presidential election; in more politically conscious enclaves, organizers lodge rightful critiques of the dominant parties’ current and respective acts of fascist repression and unwavering support of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.
But to us Afrikans living in the United States, and to all colonized people across the world, fascism is not new. And while we support the Left’s efforts to expose the evils of fascism wherever it appears—fascism is, after all, a global force that capitalists employ to repress revolutionary movements and liberation struggles—as Afrikan organizers and political educators with Black Men Build, we see a gap in the prevailing analysis. While much of the current conversation focuses on interwar Europe, most often Italy or Germany, our goal in this post is to offer a historical perspective on the subject that centers the experiences of Afrikans, both on the continent and of the diaspora, as well as the colonized people of the world.
Doing so, we believe, is our duty to our people and necessary for furthering the international struggle against fascist oppression. In this piece, we rely on George Jackson and other political prisoners, whose analysis has been shaped and sharpened by the extreme fascist violence and repression they experienced within the United States carceral system. Given their experiences with fascist repression by the state, these people are, in Orisanmi Burton’s words, the “tip of the spear” of revolutionary action and analysis.
A Revolutionary Definition of Fascism
In Blood in My Eye, Jackson provides a definition of fascism that grounds our analysis. He writes that fascism is, “at its core . . . an economic rearrangement.” When capitalism is threatened by its own internal crises, as well as external threats from revolutionary movements, fascism is what the capitalist class employs to right the ship. It is “an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s rulers,” with an “ultimate aim” to destroy revolutionary consciousness. It “tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity.”
Jackson recognized that fascism is a “living, moving thing” that surfaces wherever and whenever there is a struggle between capitalism and socialism. While fascism’s core function is to intervene in this struggle on the side of capitalism, the way it fulfills its function varies across time, place, and conditions. This means our analysis of fascism is underdeveloped if we focus solely (or even primarily) on fascism in Europe after World War I; instead, we must take the principles with us and analyze how fascism lives and moves everywhere, at all times.
Fascism & Colonialism
In light of Jackson’s analysis, fascism should be seen as a political-economic process grounded in a history that spans centuries. Long before the more well-known instances of fascism in Italy and Germany, fascism was already present in the practices of colonialism, which propped up the young global capitalist system while demolishing any resistance from indigenous populations.
In his “Discourse on Colonialism,” Aimé Césaire writes extensively about the connection between fascism and colonialism. There, Césaire describes the hypocrisy of the response of European countries to the surge of Nazi violence they were suffering during World War II:
they hide the truth from themselves…. that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Before suffering the violence of colonialism at the hands of Nazi Germany, many of these countries had perpetrated colonialism directly (most notably by joining Germany in dividing and colonizing Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries), aided and abetted its perpetration, or did nothing to stop it.
The same hypocrisy can be seen in the historical record of the United States, where European settler colonizers who arrived in the Americas swiftly engaged in genocide and land evictions against Native Americans, while simultaneously shrieking about the injustices of England’s colonial policies. These colonizers’ decimation of the Native American population via constant war and other means was aimed at maintaining the colonial, capitalist economic system and eradicating any possibility of organized resistance.
Another prominent example of colonialism in the Americas that aligns with our understanding of fascism comes from European colonizers’ enslavement of Africans. Enslaved African labor fueled the development of capitalism and paved the way for the slave-owning class to control and entrench the growing capitalist system. Of course, enslaved Africans rebelled against their conditions constantly; and of course, the colonizers responded with repression. The precise forms of colonialism Native Americans suffered were different from what enslaved Africans suffered. But in both cases, the colonizers’ mission to eradicate revolutionary consciousness remained intact. (Indeed, the scholar James Whitman has written that the Nazi regime so deeply admired these methods that it sent its top legal officials to the United States to gain “special insight into the workings of American legal and economic life through study and lectures.”)
The political-economic and societal domination that European colonizers imposed on the Native Americans and enslaved Africans in the Americas are not identical to the precise forms of domination that were present in Italy and Germany after World War I. However, across all of these examples, the oppressors were committed to eradicating any conditions (whether material or ideological) that supported the growth of revolutionary movements. Thus, understanding the parallels across all of these examples strengthens our capacity to fight against fascism in its many forms.
Forming a United Front
To understand how we can fight against fascism, we return to George Jackson. Jackson understood that while “international socialism” arose as a force in opposition to emerging monopoly capitalism during the first half of the 20th century, fascism emerged during the same time period in its highest form. Movements have since attempted to confront this “fascist-corporativism,” and we examine one of those attempts here: the Negro Sanhedrin.
The Negro Sanhedrin took place in Chicago in 1924. According to Kelly Miller, who was Dean of Howard University at the time and one of the Sanhedrin’s organizers, the Sanhedrin was a national conference that attempted to bring “a union of organizations” together from the U.S. Afrikan population to coordinate efforts to address the dire situation of Afrikan organizations and people in the country. At the time, core issues included the racist terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the defeat of an anti-lynching bill in the U.S. Congress. An impending presidential election, Miller argued, would not resolve the “fundamental problems” Afrikans faced in a white supremacist, fascist United States. Instead, civil rights organizations would come together for this “All Race Conference” and “speak with the voice of authority for the whole race” in order to shape the future of Afrikans in the United States.
While the Negro Sanhedrin succeeded in convening leaders and members of various Afrikan-led political organizations from across the United States, it did not build or wield any measurable political power. Ironically, it was lead organizers like Miller who imposed their conservative political agendas on the proceedings, ostracizing the cohort of attending Black communists and limiting their ability to make a case for a number of radical positions, including decolonizing the continent of Africa and ending racial segregation in the United States housing market. The Sanhedrin adjourned and never reconvened.
There are important lessons to glean from the origin and termination of the Negro Sanhedrin. One is that this call for a conference of Afrikan organizations was a direct response to the fascist oppression suffered by the Afrikan community. In the years preceding the Sanhedrin, waves of white supremacist terrorism, dispossession, and mass lynchings—that is, “Red Summers”—struck dozens of cities. To George Jackson’s point, a higher stage of (revolutionary) organization becomes necessary when fascism emerges and seeks to destroy revolutionary consciousness.
During the time of the Negro Sanhedrin, conditions were so horrific that Afrikans in the United States from across the political spectrum believed it was necessary for them to convene together in the interest of eradicating fascist conditions. But a predominance of Black capitalists and reformist Black Nationalists dragged the conference backward, away from its revolutionary potential. Thus, another lesson learned from the Sanhedrin is that conservative elements within an antifascist formation must be identified, addressed, and eradicated. Otherwise, the movement has no chance of confronting fascism, let alone defeating it.
Despite the failures of the Negro Sanhedrin, its aspirations echo a position taken seriously by the Black Panthers and endorsed more recently by Black Liberation Army member Dhoruba bin Wahad: a united front against fascism. In the current electoral cycle, Dhoruba has argued in favor of the formation of a single, mass leftist political party that unifies existing leftist parties—such as the Green Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and others—and runs candidates at the local, state, and national levels. Whatever the context, we have a revolutionary responsibility: to educate ourselves about our enemy, establish a shared political understanding of what it takes to win, and organize to make the victory manifest.
