Rev Left Radio - A Philosophy of Antifascism: Existentialism, Decolonization, & The Three-Way Fight

Episode Date: August 16, 2020

Devin Zane Shaw, philosophy professor and author of "Egalitarian Moments", joins Breht to discuss his newest book "Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy". Find Devin on Twitter HERE New RLR Shirts Here:  https://goodsforthepeople.com/all-goods/revolutionary-left-radio  Outro Music: 'Cloak' by Blvck Svm  LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on Professor Devin Zane Shaw to talk about his new book, Philosophy of Anti-Fascism, Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy. It's a book that really sort of connects the anti-fascist tradition with a sort of existentialist outlook. It brings in the importance of settler colonialism, when it comes to understanding fascism, particularly in the United States and Canada. And it's just a really unique and wonderful way of analyzing and thinking through problems of fascism, anti-fascism, the difference between a militant socialist anti-fascism and a liberal anti-fascism and so many other things.

So specifically for those people who are interested in the anti-fascist fight are interested and have liked our past episodes on existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir, et cetera, you'll really get a lot out of this conversation. Again, the book is Philosophy of Anti-Fascism, Punching Nazis, and Fighting White Supremacy. And here is my discussion with its author, Devin Zane Shaw. Enjoy it. Hi, I'm Devon Shaw. I teach philosophy at Douglas College in British Columbia. Before that, I was a contract instructor for over a decade. And then now I'm at a more permanent position. Over the years, I've written three books on philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. And most recently, I've also published a pamphlet called The Politics of the Blockade about the Wet Sweat and Solidarity Actions in February of 2020. Wonderful. Well, it's an absolute honor to have you on the show. We'll be discussing your book anti-fascism or its philosophy of anti-fascism. fascism, punching Nazis, and fighting white supremacy, which will also, of course, link to in the

show notes of this episode. First and foremost, though, why did you write this book and what did you sort of hope to accomplish with it? As I talk about, I think it's in the acknowledgement, so maybe people will skip it, so I'll say it here, is this kind of started about a general project looking at concepts of egalitarianism and violence and philosophy handles violence poorly, typically. And I thought maybe we could take a different approach. That dates the project to about 2016 or 2017. I can't exactly remember when I started. And then, of course, along the way, it became more concrete.

Obviously, the big thing that happened, of course, that everyone thinks of when you say punching Nazis is, of course, the very famous incident on inauguration day in 2017 when Richard Spencer got punched on Australian television. and that became a meme and its own sort of internet sensation. So that finally gave me a concrete way to think about the problem because it was there was here was anti-fascist political practice on the ground that helped give that a concrete shape and think about what's going on that's contemporary.

This also at the same time, I wanted to talk back to philosophy because the discipline of philosophy can be very backwards and reactionary. and even when it's not backwards and reactionary has a strong stake in the status quo and for as much as it talks about itself as being free and rational inquiry is really imbricated in institutions of prestige and the star system and various other things

and many of these stars and various others they're very radical on paper and I don't want to knock that but when confronted with concrete practice like punching Nazis, they've done a terrible job at assessing that. So a lot of what passes for radical philosophy has fallen back on trite homilies about nonviolence. And so, you know, I wanted to push back against that. And then I work on existentialism and the place I now teach,

that's like the big continental philosophy course in our discipline. and it's popular and it remains popular in higher education and still has some broader cultural purchase. You know, you see existentialism referencing things like The Good Life and there's a guy, I'm not going to talk about him, there's no reason, no one on your podcast is going to go out and buy his books, but he kind of pitches, he pitches, you know, it's like existentialism for businessmen and stuff like this. And so it's enough that there's, yeah, I know, it's enough that there's even a book, it's something like Sartre for Surfers, and there's not even a reference to the book to Sartre for Surfers, and there's not even a reference to the book to Sartre in that.

So there's enough kind of popular cultural purchase in there. You know, what I wanted to do is I'm sick of the idea and tired of the idea that existentialism is either an absurdist asceticism, which I sort of associate with Camus, who didn't want to be an existentialist, and I'd rather he wasn't in the bunch when it comes down to it. Or a kind of high-minded hedonism, where there's a lot of people that sort of teach it as this individual,

individualism. It sort of recognizes the futility of everything, but you can go out and enjoy life while you're at it. And, you know, I don't want to take away the idea that people should enjoy life. That's not where I'm going with this. But the kind of reduction to, you know, ironically enough, this kind of reduction of it to just enjoying life comes down to positions that both Sartre and Beauvoir criticized and that people have to sort of willfully ignore. So to put this in a more academic language just for a second is to say when I'm talking to other existentialists, and I go to lots of conferences for these kinds of things, very commonly, they treat it as a kind of hyper-individualism.

And what I'm trying to get at by looking at the works from the 1940s in particular, where this individualist philosophy is often derived, is that at the same time, they're talking to Marxists, they're talking to anarchists, they're talking to anti-colonial thinkers, which means that my peers are making a deliberate choice to ignore that material. And I just wanted to put all these views on notice and sort of, you know, put people's feet to the fire. And, you know, I don't have expectations that academics are going to read this and then go out and completely change their political practice. But I'd hope that, you know, they get a kind of twinge of conscience by realizing that they're sort of doing this very complacent approach to this kind of problem.

Yeah, absolutely. My experiences in philosophy departments as an undergrad and graduate certainly reflect that. reality of there's sort of being a if not a full on reactionary then at least just a status quo enabling sort of atmosphere certainly like even there's like this idea at least in my experience as an undergrad where you can talk about political philosophy as political philosophy but if you try to get down to the the roots of a situation or talk in terms of concrete action they'd actually shy away from those sorts of discussions so I am definitely in line with you on that whole problem in philosophy. And then for people that listen to Rev. Left, we've done numerous episodes

on anti-fascism, like historically on people who partake in anti-fascist action, and then a bunch of episodes on existentialism, on Sartra, etc. So this fusing of anti-fascist philosophy with an existentialist lens, I thought was really fascinating and unique, and certainly is perfect for our audience. But let's go ahead and move on and talk about different accounts of fascism, and there are a few of them. The general Marxist position, which I often advocate for and defend, is the idea that fascism is a form that capitalism takes when it's under pressure from crises or insurgent left-wing movements, etc.

In this book, though, you offer a couple other takes on fascism, which include the idea that it could possibly be revolutionary or at least anti-capitalist and thus sort of fall outside the orthodox Marxist position and the idea that fascism is perhaps anti-Bougeois but not anti-capitalist. I found all of that discussion very interesting. Can you talk about these sort of different frameworks for understanding what fascism and it is and then which one you sort of settle on is the most plausible? Yeah.

So interestingly, when I started this book, I, as you might have noticed, I try to look, I like the historical stuff. I think it very much comes out when I'm looking at Du Bois and I'm talking about Du Bois's concept of whiteness. And I really start digging in for the ways that this plays out historically. And so I tried to do this with the concept of fascism, and then it completely bogged down the manuscript to try to do like a long assessment of the various positions. And I found really when it comes down to it that I found most useful were three non-Orthodox Marxist definitions as a point of departure. And they really came out of organizing, really, and doing anti-fascist work on the ground where

when we wanted to reflect on what's going on and what we should look at and how to conceptualize these issues, these two books kept coming up. So there was two of these that you mentioned are published in confronting fascism, which was recently reprinted by Chris Plobadeb and by recently, I think it was like two years ago. So that's Jay Sakai and that's Don Hammerquist. And then the other one is Matthew and Lyons, which I would now say presently, if you want to see that you should go read and the audience to go check out his book, Insurgent Supremicists, which I really think for me, when it comes to researching the far right, for me, this is just kind of the, I mean, it's just my go-to. And when someone is interested in this now, I just hand it to them and I said, work through this, and then we're going to build from here. And as you know, I have some criticism of Lyons' work, and I've talked to him a little bit about them as well, and he's been really nice in responding and generous with his time for that. So it's always nice when an author's also a nice person when you just sort of cold call them.

But these were the main things we were discussing. At the time, it was, you know, there was a little pamphlet about the far right that then was included in his larger book Insurgent Supremicists. And so I worked from there because these were the ones we were talking about. And I think they helped, they have a connection to the three-way fight, which we'll talk about, obviously, but I'll just still keep going with this. So the first that you talked about, the key point here is that it's Don Hammerquist essay is the first to show up. And this is the one that suggests that fascism could be revolutionary or anti-capitalist in its contemporary forms. And I criticize this using Sakai's response. I think the key thing out of Hammerquist, it's funny, I just taught this stuff to a class on a special, a sort of dedicated class called the Problems of Philosophy that was just about fascism. And I really appreciated Hammerquist in retrospect, even though I don't think I give him a lot of credit in this. He was really good for teaching because he mostly spent a lot of time going through, they're going, and here's what he's saying about the history of orthodox interpretations, and here's where he's departing, and then here's where he's wrong. But he really generates a lot of the questions.

in a way that is interesting. The key thing out of this is it's a rejection of the the line that we associate with Demetrov and Orthodox Marxism that isolates fascism as a reaction of one, you know, the one most terroristic and reactionary form of capitalism when, you know, I think that, you know, historically that was in order to help justify a popular front.

And today is sort of not used exactly in that way, but still in a way that's unhelpful because I think a lot of people will use it to then try to undermine the idea that you should use direct action and again I don't want to overgeneralize it's just how I've encountered the Demetrov line from let's say some old timers that may have been involved in anti-fascist work back in the day and you can say back in the day to mean whenever you want if you've ever encountered that so I then moved to Sakai to say he helps because he says fascism is anti-Borsh and not anti-capitalist, which helps focus it on the idea that fascism is going to be anti-Borgia in the sense that it's going to attack bourgeois institutions of class rule, basically, that are used, as I argue, to try to present class domination as objective right, as Hegel would say, or we could, you know, or the state is neutral or something along those lines. And then Sakai also situates far-right social movements in relation to settler colonialism and the white labor aristocracy, unsurprisingly, given that he's well known for the book settlers. And then Sakai helps us really helps motivate one other aspect of this, is that when Sakai was doing a kind of historical reflection about why fascism didn't emerge in North America in the 1930s and 1940s, he notes, and I think this is pretty close to the quotation from this essay, he says,

white settler colonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche. Having one capitalist society didn't yet need the other. And so in this way, he's kind of saying settler colonialism offered a kind of form of continuing a certain kind of project that didn't have to lapse into fascism for a political solution in the way that it did in Italy and Germany. And this didn't happen in a place like the United States, despite places like Germany looking at United States settler colonialism as a kind of social model. And I aim to expand upon this claim to try to say, if this is in fact true, then we need to

be able to explain why we see the emergence now. And this is where I adapt a bit of lions and a bit of Roland Chesana Robinson as well to say we can look then at the perception of the idea that there's a crisis in settler colonialism. And this perception part's important. I generally agree with the idea that fascism is a form the capitalism takes when it's under pressure from crises and left-wing movements. And I think I don't want to be a naysayer here, but we see that the reemergence of fascism in North America as a social movement since 2016 really obviously was responding to things like Black Lives Matter, but also a kind of perception that was amplifying the kind of urgency. they were finding there and that that has its whole history i won't go into that but i think the key that comes out of um it comes out of looking at the the kind of ideology of uh far right movements that

i think robinson touches on is it is that the key out of this is that what they're experiencing in the middle of this is summarizing way too quickly out of the book um in the kind of neoliberal policy that is in some way a kind of way of mediating crises as they go on in capital accumulation. What happens here is we see a kind of, as Robinson writes, a thirst for a new frontier for recolonization or for a white homeland. In other words, they thirst for the fulfillment of the settler dream, which is a project, it is important to note, they think, has failed for that to be dreamt anew. And so, you know, that plays a major part in the book. So, you know, I realized I didn't really give a definition beyond lines.

So I'm going to modify lines and just say, to try to summarize it, fascism in my view is a social movement involving a relatively autonomous and insurgent base, potentially mass base, hopefully not. That's why you go out and fight it now. But challenges bourgeois institutional and cultural power while re-entrenching economic and social hierarchy. And I always, especially in this book, I'm specific to North American settler colonialism in Canada and the United States, that means that this is a re-entrenchment of white supremacy,

heteropatriarchy, abelism, indigenous dispossession, and capital accumulation. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an incredibly important thing to add when you're talking about the North American context and that history of white supremacy and settler colonialism, which, you know, might not have existed in that way in places like perhaps Germany, but especially in places like Italy, that settler colonial apparatus does add a whole new layer. through which you must interpret fascism in that context. So I think that's an important addition to the more orthodox understanding of fascism.

And you did mention this idea of a three-way fight, which I thought was an important thing to always keep in mind when you're talking about fascism and anti-fascism, because sometimes it can very well be left out of that entire conversation. So can you talk about what the three-way fight is and why it's sort of important part of this overall understanding? Yeah. So the three-way fight, as I understand it,

was developed to fight off fascist creep and anti-globalization movements in the late 1990s and after. Then, as is now, the militant left fights capitalism and imperialism. And what we want to distinguish it from is there are anti-globalization kind of currents in the far right. But, you know, they're fighting for capitalism and imperialism that's more conducive to white supremacy, which they think bourgeois democracy has failed to deliver, and they have conspiracy theories about this. One of the funny points about this is I didn't know the concept of the three-way fight until many years later. But, you know, we, I was involved in some of the anti-globalization movements in the late 1990.

I grew up in a small town in California. So it's not like I was involved in these major organizations or on some, you know, some of the famous things like the battle in Seattle or something like this. But we were near San Francisco and going up there. and doing things and sometimes involved with people in other cities. And we were trying to come up with this. And I always argued that, you know, there was this strong current back in the 90s that we're seeing reemerge right now, which is that kind of alliance between, well, you know, it's both, this is one of these things where, you know, the interest is beyond left

and right. And, you know, I'd always argue the minute someone says beyond left and right, what they're saying is they're trying to normalize fascism or some kind of fascist movement. And years later, I find a three-way fight discussion, and I realized that, you know, we've been making this distinction here, and thank God it's there. And, you know, rereading all this stuff right now was kind of like a trip down memory lane in a sad way because you see people falling into the same errors. I really wanted to put that right at the front to say, I really want people to understand that a lot of these, you see today, especially online, a lot of this trite reading of Marxism that's really sort of either Marxism to own the list. which I think is really a kind of rightist problem. And then the other thing I might say is it's really just a sort of reiteration of kind of white chauvinism

that formulated itself in sort of socialist movements that talks about this kind of crap about meeting people where they are, which is always just an excuse to meet them at whatever bigotry they have and not meet them in the sense where someone is complaining about, you know, exploitation you meet them at that point of exploitation but that doesn't mean you meet them at the point where you say hey i've got an explanation for what's going on here but you don't meet him and go yeah well you're racist so we're going to kind of we're going to kind of coddle that for a bit until you get your concepts right about surplus value then we'll talk to you about race right and i still think you see a lot of this going on and where i grew up was in the central

valley of california and it's a reactionary place and there was a lot of that and i just said you i don't have any tolerance for this the way i use it for the book is more specific in the sense that I want to criticize some common sense views of relationships between liberalism, far-right movements, and anti-fascism to attack the, you know, there's this kind of horseshoe theory that liberalism kind of articulates and far-right movements exploit quite frequently that equivocates between fascism and anti-fascism because they see insurgent movements to pose a threat to the state monopoly on violence. And so they just say, oh, yeah, well, you know, this is both violence, so they're equivalent.

And this is really problematic because it completely empties fascism of its heinous political character. It doesn't have a definition of what its political ideology wants to accomplish and just focuses on violence. And it's true. Look, fascism is a movement that is absolutely willing to use brute violence to accomplish that its aims, but that's not what exclusively makes it's part of the movement, but it's not sufficient to define fascism. It's a handy equivocation for the bourgeoisie because it allows them to shore up state power against the left. And I really wanted to get at that, so there's a criticism right out of the gate of that position. And then the next thing is I wanted to use the three-way fight to help us understand settler state hegemony. So I talk a bit

about settler state hegemony. And sometimes I call it, especially when I'm conversing with in the book and other writings, actually, with the history of the black radical tradition and the indigenous radical tradition. You know, I'll talk about white hegemony as well. There's no real good shorthand to try to get it the kind of way this is all woven together. But the basic idea is I argue that settler state hegemony is built out of a kind of stabilization of the relationship between bourgeois democracy or liberalism and white supremacy as it's realized throughout settler colonialism as conquest and various other things.

And those two things reach points of stabilization to continue a kind of hegemonic project of the settler state. And to put it polemically, what I wanted to get at is I wanted to show in the three-way fight that there's a different way of there are necessarily different tactics and strategies and discourses in addressing the way that liberalism acts in our society or bourgeois democracy acts and the way that far right movements or white supremacist movements act and work. As you'll see, this book is very much oriented towards arguing at liberal anti-fascists. So it needs to put liberal anti-fascists in the jackpot by saying,

the thing you're advocating has a history of laundering white supremacist force as objective right. and you need to come you need to be able to face that frankly and deal with that and that's really what I wanted to aim at with that absolutely that's essential so that three-way fight is between the anti-fascist left the fascist right and the liberal center and that settler state hegemony and that underlying white supremacy is actually what unites the liberal center with the more explicit fascist far right and so I like that you're setting it up that way to hedge against distortions of you know obviously against any bullshit about a red and brown alliance, but also to showcase that the conditions that liberalism creates actually perpetuate and help give rise to fascism in the first place. And so

we fight the explicit symptoms of fascism, but we also need to fight the underlying conditions that continually give rise to them. And once you start doing that, then you're infringing on liberal territory of private property, capitalism, settler colonialism, et cetera. So I really appreciate that point. And then just to touch quickly on your point about meeting people where they are. And I agree there's an important distinction to be made. You can meet people where they are when somebody has an underdeveloped political analysis and needs help understanding their position in the class or racial hierarchy. And that's not the same thing as meeting people where they are in terms of giving ground to racism because you're trying to bring somebody over. And there are elements of what I would

pin as the right wing of the DSA specifically, or at least that broad movement, which does sometimes fall into that latter category of, of, you know, excusing racism or, you know, different forms of bigotry in the name of meeting people where they are, which really just does provide cover for those racist and bigoted sentiments and statements and statements to be ushered in to the left. And so we should always be on the lookout for that. So, yeah, great answer. I really appreciate that about your book. And I know we touched on this a little bit in the intro, but, you know, maybe we could flesh it out, which is one unique aspect of this work is that you do utilize an existentialist framework to help lucidate your overall arguments.

Can you talk a little bit more about what existentialism and some of its main exponents offer in terms of thinking through anti-fascism and why you brought on board some existentialist ideas and concepts to think through? Yeah, and I'm going to try to keep to the big picture for this part here, because I really have a, I want to jump into some of the, you know, the minutia sometimes. And so I'm just going to give a big picture. with this at this point and just say when it comes down to it existentialism is you know a background that i've got um as i talk about it i think that they provide a very interesting and fertile ground

for thinking about problems of anti-fascism i think there are plenty of other places like right now i'm looking a lot at herbert marcusa because i think his work in the 60s and 70s would be interesting to put in contrast with um things like in ways that he didn't actually do um like the black panther party or the sojourner truth organization or SDS or something like this and think about those relationships maybe even some of the European movements as well but I'm thinking of the sort of American North American terrain there but existentialism was interesting because they have a history of their work right after the end of World War II took on a much more explicit anti-fascist character some of it was written during the war but of course couldn't be published under the

Vichy regime. Sartra did publish some plays and staged some plays that were heavily coded sort of pro-liberation works. But the kind of analysis they were working on seems some of the books we could say they date partially from that period, but of course could have never seen the light of day. And I was also interested in them because they were willing to engage with anti-colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. And originally I thought I was going to do a lot of that. And then, as I said earlier, I really found that I wanted to get dive back into the 1940s and really challenge the conventional picture of the 1940s being them sitting in cafes and sipping on apricot cocktails and sort of lounging and then discovering their political conscience later. And I really wanted to challenge that. It was the kind of narrative I was using.

And, you know, I found that it wasn't true to my experience when I actually sat down with the text. So I thought it's time to really get serious with this. Now, it also offers, because we can point to, well, the first thing is, thanks to the anti-colonial work, we can point to relationships with people like Fanon, and that's important, and you see that in the book, and you can link it to Glenn Sean Coulthard, who wrote Redskin White Masks, which is an extremely important book about indigenous resurgence, and I wanted to have those kind of things accessible to me, but at the same time, existentialism did two other things for this book that I hope people see when they go through this, is existentialism. capitalism begins with a kind of familiar terrain for liberal anti-fascists, and I haven't defined them yet. So they're people that tend to, they're against fascism, but they tend to still rely on the idea that the marketplace of ideas will somehow weed out fascist and far-right ideas. And then they have a really ambiguous relationship to state power in the sense that they're typically critics of it, but then when you say, well, who's going to stop the far right? They kind of

have a theory of sternly worded letters. And beyond that, they don't really have anything else, which means, as I really start leaning on them, and I'll expand upon this as well, is when I really start leaning on it, it means that really they just have a bad faith account of, they really rely on state power despite being critics of it. And I really want to just put that on them, that accountability on them, and say, look, you're not following through with this. You're actually in bad faith. And then there's a part about existentialism and militant movements that I found to be helpful is that I think it's fairly obvious in this book that I articulate a united front position as a kind of just basic starting point for this between anarchists and various different currents of Marxism and then and then, you know, various other groups, like I said, I'm pulling in the black radical tradition, which can draw from either of those and sometimes have independent movements that are critical of it. Same thing with indigenous radical movements.

And the key thing here was that they existentialists articulate some things that fit right into the United Front stuff. And without us having to get to the particulars, and this is just because in my experience, you know, when I was growing up in the States, the strongest groups that were around were either going to be obnoxious and revisionist Marxist groups that we didn't really interact with. and I wasn't interested in interacting with because I found them to be fairly conservative in their outlook in the late 90s and early 2000s. And so I largely came up out of anarchist movements back then. But up here, in my experience when I was doing a lot of this stuff, there were a lot of Maoist organizations

that were involved in anti-fascism. And, you know, I want to be able to talk to both groups. I want to be able to have this discussion with, I also do a lot of, what I did, I don't know a lot of people in the new, I've only been in my current area for two years, so I still don't know a lot of people out here. But where I was previously, you know, I had connections into indigenous rights movements, and I was involved with some of them doing stuff.

And I wanted to be able to converse with them, too. And existentialism and some of its broad things helped to gain accessibility and interaction with those movements without sort of sometimes raising the hackles of people who sometimes are like, wait a second, where are you coming from with this? so it gives us a chance to talk about state power from the perspective of a united front where there are concerns that are raised in the book that i want to say look let's focus on what we need to focus on even though of course there are parts i even mentioned in the book as much as i say this that that i think become very clear if you're reading it trying to suss out where i come from you know i find anarchist views of the state to be a historical even though i came out of those circles for example and so i i try to get very specific about the kind of historical circumstances which is what led me to the discussion of settler colonialism. And then you'll also see there's a little bit of gestures about abolitionism, which is now in the news, as we all know,

and part of the uprising that's been going on in the U.S. for two months now. And there's connections to abolitionism where I would say, in some ways I've used sometimes Marxist groups to be a little too ready to neutralize the politics involved in that. they'll articulate the racism and the class oppression, but there's just sometimes with some groups, and again, this is very generalizing, but you occasionally run across this attitude. They kind of act like you can pick up and grab the repressive apparatus. If there's a successful revolutionary movement, you can kind of pick up the repressive apparatus without

sort of realizing just how reactionary and how problematic that could be, and actually an impediment to success. Definitely. not actually agree more as a Marxist. I agree that that sentiment does exist and you do run into it from time to time. Marxist as a whole, I think, are getting better on that, but it's definitely something. And even in these current talks about abolition, you'll sometimes see that thought that it's like, well, we're not abolitionists because after the revolution, we're going to need to use these things to beat our, you know, our counter-revolutionary forces or whatever. And sometimes that can be very sort of myopic, short-sighted and not really critical in its analysis of what

bigger structures and forces the carceral state the police force etc serve and if it's even possible at all to you know pick those things up without fundamentally transforming them in the process but again that's a bigger argument for another day but i totally agree with your overall take on that but now that we have a general idea of what existentialism can offer and sort of your individual history with existentialism let's drill down a bit because although you do talk about existentialism a lot in this text broadly, you really focus on a few thinkers, and one of those thinkers is Simone de Beauvoir. So can you talk about, and we've had, obviously, episodes on existentialism and Beauvoir before,

so people that have, our long-term listeners of Rev. Left will certainly have some pre-existing knowledge of her and her role in history. But I was hoping you could talk a little bit about Bovar and what her life and work specifically offer the anti-fascist movement. Yeah, I really focus in this work on her texts, the ethics of ambiguity. It's one of my favorite books. So very commonly when people say, you know, what are your top five books? Like, if you had to just work with those.

And they always have these kind of thought experiments with us say this kind of stuff. And, you know, I've got like thousands of these sitting around. And so it's always very hard. I can definitely say the ethics of ambiguity. It's a turning point in a certain way in existentialism, as I argue. I enjoy reading it. It's translation. English is terrible, which I think needs to be rectified at some point.

it's absolutely for the for an existentialist we've just been reading a terror like a terrible translation that needs to be corrected because i've read it in french and the french is amazing and it has a lot more of the obvious existential terminology that is just completely lost in the old translation by it not like the second sex where it was a guy who who didn't know what he was doing and then tried to simplify and omit parts that were difficult but by a person who just wasn't good at the translation. And the work he did for translating Sartre has been surpassed now by new translations, but not Beauvoir. And so now we're faced with looking at Beauvoir as this kind of like commentator, but she's just as, you know, right in the thick

of the conceptual apparatus as Sartre is. And it's funny. She, the book is, you know, it raises all the challenges that the people raised in the 1940s and responds to them. So, you know, I, mentioned Marcousas. I'll use him again. And like, I think it's 1948 or something. He wrote a response to Sartre, and many of his arguments were focused on being a nothingness. And that's fair. I mean, he's aiming at being a nothingness. But by 1947, Beauvoir had already sort of solved a lot

of the issues that Marcusa raised. He should have gone after that book, and then we could have seen a really productive dialogue there. And I think a combination of sexism and a combination of bad translation, as for much of Beauvoir's work, has really obscured the importance of her approach. I used her work specifically here because I think she's much more clear in articulating the way in which the existentialist concept of human freedom really places a responsibility and obligation

for people to work towards the expansion of freedom for others. And then there's a second aspect that I find to be very important is that she maintains that all human action, even those things for solidarity or various other things that we tend to view in a positive light. She always says, just remember, this always involves some kind of conflict with others because there are people with a stake in the status quo. And I think this is really good for challenging liberal views that sort of view individual actions to not sort of have a necessarily conflictual dimension.

And they tend to presume something like what happens in discourse and every day, discussions is social peace precedes social antagonism or conflict, and they don't recognize how this so-called peace rests on a violent, repressive state apparatus. And Beauvoir, I think, really forces you to come to terms with that particular aspect in articulating the relationship to direct action. So on the other hand, with Beauvoir, when we, especially in Chapter 3, her work is pretty important because we can see that many of the bad faith arguments against militant anti-fascism were refuted as far back as 1947 so she talks about a series of liberal or illiberal arguments that people make to sort of defend the status quo and i'll just choose one because i think this is a very common one is when oppressed groups or beleaguered groups raise claims about justice or oppression there's a constant far-right response to that, that makes claims like giving one group freedom comes at the cost of another's and things like this. And, you know, we see it when someone says something like Black Lives Matter,

and then they say all lives matter or something like this, is that there's a transformation of what is it at stake in the political claim to as if it's merely just a series of group interests or lobby interests that can be sort of handled within the present system. And she, She just IDs this right out of the gate and says, look, this misrepresents what politics is about because it pretends that freedom is a zero-sum game, which, you know, when it comes down to it in the broader existentialist field, they'll say, what's happening here is people are responding in a situation of scarcity, but that is rooted in the political economy and just trying to not do anything about capitalism, for instance, and the way that it pushes scarcity into place. places and try to say things are zero-sum is basically a reactionary kind of politics. But it's also the fact that this reduces the political claims about oppression and justice to particular interests in the same way that a very obvious thing was that there's a lot of people that do research on this far, on far-right discourse and things like this.

And, you know, you see in light of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, there's a deliberate effort to shift the discourse away from systemic injustice. to something like racism as a set of particular attitudes. And why do you do that? Well, when it comes down to intent and attitudes, then you just end up circulating in a kind of endless cycle of individual responsibility with a series of concepts or a framework of understanding society that occludes systemic injustice and systemic racism.

And that's a deliberate discursive maneuver on the part of reactionary and right-wing groups. And the fact that it's been normalized over the years is really telling in that regard. And 1947, we're reading Beauvoir, and she's already pointing out how this happens. And I think it's instructive for people. People need, I mean, you know, I must have a lot of faith as a college educator, instructor. As I'm like, if you can point out that there's this long history of this, you'd hope that people go, oh, oh, okay, I get it. This isn't new and this is actually, this should be tired ground. we don't have to constantly recover that's kind of idealistic now we know practically the reason

why we perpetually recover this ground is because the political hegemony we live under is setting the terms of the debate to constantly have this kind of fruitless debate because it helps the status quo yeah exactly and you know whenever we cover a book like i love this chapter and it's it's a it's a detailed deep chapter and we can only touch on some main points and some highlights so you know, never think of these interviews as replacements for reading the text, particularly if you're interested in any of this, because that chapter in particular was fascinating as somebody who for well over a decade has been fascinated with existentialism, but Simone de Beauvoir specifically. And sort of the short shift she gets generally when it comes to discussions of existentialism and how she's often sort of overshadowed by Camus and Sartra. So I really, you know, implore people who have any interest in this to read the book in that chapter because I think it's wonderful. So another philosopher that you really focus on is Jacques, I would say, Ransier. How do you pronounce that? Roncierre.

Janice Ronsier. Can you please sort of introduce a non-philosophy audience to Ronsier and then describe his philosophical contributions and sort of what they can offer to the anti-fascist movement? Yeah, it's funny. That's definitely also the most technical chapter of the book because it's also been published. And it's available actually in Open Access. An early draft of it was published as a peer review piece because, you know, that's part of our industry. And so it ends up being extremely technical.

And, you know, I'm sorry. I apologize to all potential readers in advance for this. The last section is where it really cashes out. So I'm going to focus mainly on the last section of that chapter. So Ron Sierra, just to introduce him in general, he was a student of Al Thusser, who split with him and took a Maoist direction in the late 60s and early 70s. He made his name doing historical archive research

in workers' archives in the 1970s, and some of that stuff is pretty fascinating. I count as a Roncier scholar because I wrote a book about him about his politics and aesthetics. These days, he mostly writes about aesthetics, and there's a certain way where that doesn't replace politics, and so I've sort of lost interest in his work in that regard

because it's not as concrete for me. I do like Roncier because he puts egalitarianism at the front of his political and philosophical agenda. And this is a concept that asserts what he refers to as a kind of intellectual egalitarianism. And this goes, for him this was a formulation against Althusarianism and vanguardism. And in some way fits kind of with him embracing the cultural revolution as it was understood in France, where it was the distinction, you know, undermining the distinction of the division of labor between, you know, the party or the vanguard and the, masses. And in general, he's views it as there's an assertion of the equal intelligence of

everyone in political demands here instead of just writing them off as people who are ignorant or people who are pathologized as they commonly are as riots or just violence or something. He says if we want to interpret politics, we need to do that from the perspective that there's a rationality behind these actions. We always have to start there and then build criticism if we're going to build criticism rather than just writing it off as ignorance or pathology. And, you know, from a philosophical standpoint, I find that, especially when you go back and are looking at the history of philosophy, there's something very powerful in that agenda. He's often criticized for not really being clear about the kind of material egalitarianism he has in

mind. So I like to just pop. Here comes communism as his version of material egalitarianism, whether he says that. I mean, he criticizes capitalism. But much in the way that we would say sort of French and European post-Marxism, if we can use that. But he's not quite a post-structural either. He's kind of a liminal figure in this, is that it's kind of like a, here's an acceptance of the general parameters of the critique of capitalism is found in capital volume one. And then there's not much of a subsequent development of that. It just kind of relies on that and then talks quite a bit about political agency or subjectivation. And there's a limit there. But what's important for this is that Ronscier puts egalitarianism right at the front. And I think, at least in

terms of the militant anti-fascism and what separates it from both liberal concepts of formal equality and the far-rights numerous supremacisms is a radical view of egalitarianism. And that's why I sort of chose Ronsier and Beauvoir as well, is they're both very egalitarian thinkers. And this way, you just say, look, this is a clear line of demarcation between these things. we can we can use that as a as a way to distinguish and then start to get the get the whole project off the ground in academic terms i also chose ronsiere because i wanted to show that egalitarianism does not preclude a right to community self-defense such as militant anti-fascism and doesn't reject violence on on principle and and in this regard this puts me at odds with the

pretty much the entire consensus in ronsier scholarship that's still just the background um for that To look at Section 4, what I would say specific to Ronsier, is Ronsier argues that politics is by definition egalitarian, and he opposes that, so egalitarian politics as opposed to policing, or what he calls policing, which is putting things in order or integrating social life into modes of capital accumulation. And I talk quite a bit about this and how policing isn't just re-entrenching these things, but it also is a kind of command that puts it into place. I was just reading Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Moten calls it a call to order, and I think that's really good in that sense, is it's a call to order that puts these things into place that comes out of policing as well. But I want to really say here, another way to approach the problem is to draw an analogy to Sartra's work,

and an anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre argues that we have no obligation to respect the anti-Semite because anti-Semitism aims to suppress or exterminate the Jewish people. So in his exact argument, he then concludes that anti-Semitism is not protected speech. So he kind of lapses back into a kind of conversation with liberalism on liberalism's terms here. And I wanted to depart from that a bit and say, even if we don't want to accept Ronsier's exact definition of politics, there is a kind of presumption when we call something of politics that it's afforded a certain kind of respect or right

or we actually take them seriously as a legitimate interlocutor. And so one thing I wanted to draw it to Roncierge is to kind of modernize Sartre a bit and say far right movements are not worthy of respect as legitimate interlocutors. So, you know, they're basically there in bad faith and we don't have to endlessly debate them And they're not owed the right to that because they basically work to try to just grind things down to the fact that basically everyone arrives at a kind of just sort of statistical argument where they just kind of say, well, everything, there's both sides to everything.

And so we don't really, how do we resolve that? They really want to just get recognized as legitimate interlocutors. And so I say we ought to refuse that. And so then I just say, just quickly, the far right is by turns of paraplegal. political movement and a paramilitary insurgent movement. And so first, that means you reject the far-right concepts of politics, which reduces every political demand to cynical self-or-group interests. So we just covered that a little bit of Beauvoir.

That's Ronsier's definition of parapolitics. And there are ways in which, in fact, liberalism itself is really involved in a kind of parapolitical discourse rather than a political discourse. And then along with that, we have to oppose the far. far right in the streets, because it seeks to re-entrench oppression through harassment, intimidation, and violence. So we resituate this, in fact, as a kind of policing, but not in an institutional sense where you say, there's the cops.

In fact, these are far-right movements that are doing something similar to policing, but are not institutionalized in a similar way. Yeah, I love that. I found that whole chapter and all the related philosophy fascinating. And I really like that point about how fascist sort of cynically weaponize things. that liberals love like you know open debate and free speech they weaponize it in bad faith in the moment they get the power they'll eliminate it all but they appeal to liberals on those bases and in the early days of the the latest rise of fascism 2016 charlottesville etc all the discourse around

free speech was really driven by the far right and it's sort of appeal to liberals which worked and you had liberals conservatives libertarians basically falling into that trap and the far left obviously knew what the fascist right was doing, but it did work. And so that's just something we should definitely keep an eye out and understand that that's how fascist work. And liberals get duped so easily by that sort of rhetoric. And it's very powerful in a lot of ways to mainstreaming fascism. One more figure I want to touch on is W.E.B. Du Bois, who you talk about in your book. And you know, lately I've become increasingly interested in Du Bois. And I'm actually working on a project for Rev. Left about his work. So I was happy to see you.

you emphasize him in your book, saying that his critiques of, like, colonialism, whiteness and capitalism, quote, anticipated existentialist thought. Can you talk a bit about him, how his work anticipated existentialist thought, and sort of what he offers to this overall understanding of anti-fascism? Yeah, so I have enough of an interest in Du Bois's work that I found a discounted copy of his, what is it, it's like the Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Collected works. So I actually bought a copy as a reward to myself at some point. It's like, you know, 19 volumes.

lately i found a good i found a good copy of the the abccs of color which is a kind of compilation of his work from uh 1963 from i think that's the international publishers you know his work is is pretty incredible and after i say that his work is important because he identifies a lot of things in such a way that you can say a lot of the contemporary concerns uh that we have um are anticipated, not just an existentialist thought, and I do say it'd be nice if, in fact, they had taken some cognizance of this, especially because I would assume that Richard Wright, who they knew, would have some familiarity with Du Bois, even if he thought maybe Du Bois was Passé at that point, that, you know, they could have said, well, Sartre, if you're working

on anti-Semitism, you could read some stuff about races. It's articulated in Du Bois or whatever. But the key thing here is figures like Du Bois and someone I just mentioned in passing in the book like Anna Julia Cooper is again it's important to say one of the main ways that the criticisms of institutional racism and various other things are raised is often that it's this kind of like privileged and contemporary kind of academic discourse and one of the things about this book that I really wanted to drive home for that not that like people that say this kind of stuff we're going to read it but I still wanted to put the evidence in here is that these aren't these aren't new like i make a lot of i i draw a lot out of du boys's essay the souls of white folk

that original essay was published in 1910 and then and then revised and collected in dark water and published in 1920 it's the 100th year anniversary of dark water there should have been actually thanks to covid there aren't but there were in the works a lot of conferences and and special issues dedicated to looking at that dark water because there's been a revival of looking at that book But then when I found it was from 1910, I mean, like, this just stretches further and further back. And what's stretching back? Well, we know Du Bois these days, either through the souls of black folk, that's the text from 1903 that is very commonly referenced by liberal approaches to Du Bois's work and they draw certain things out of his work. Or, you know, Marxists now especially have a much stronger understanding of Du Bois coming out of Black Reconstruction and then now they're getting into dark water a bit.

And Black Reconstruction is, of course, very well known for having the reference to what we sort of now take up as the wages of whiteness or his reference to the public and psychological wage of whiteness. And so that's very well known in the sense that he says, you know, what happened here in the end of reconstruction was a reconstitution of a kind of social hegemony around this figure of whiteness that could help undermine. well, it did undermine any racial solidarity that may have been present as a part of a class project of reaffirming bourgeois power. And so that's what that did. And that analysis is in the souls of white folk in 1920 and in part in 1910. What I wanted to pick up is that one thing that seems to have sort of disappeared or that he didn't follow up in his work from that essay is this idea of whiteness as dominion. And so we now have two things. We have a kind of picture of whiteness as underlying dominion in terms of colonialism and settler colonialism. And then we have this idea

of entitlement, which then is used as in the book I talk a bit about this, it plays out in kind of property and expectations that's codified into liberal law when they're originally structures of oppression and, you know, domination that then show up as sort of neutral legal features. And so I wanted to get at that. So the key thing, a couple key things to take out of Du Bois. First, of course, is that Du Bois recognizes even way back then, and we know this now from books like Wages of Whiteness from David Rodiger and a lot of other research, you know, Ignatiev, Noel Ignatiev and the STO did some work on this and various other things, is that this idea of whiteness is not a phenotype. It's a malleable concept that helps

hegemony along racial lines. It has a history. And even Du Bois says we're watching people immigrate And they move in their status in society. They earn whiteness in a certain kind of way. And what is whiteness? Well, it's buying into this hegemony. It then sort of puts a response. If you buy in, then you start acting as a kind of citizen deputy for whiteness. And that's kind of how you buy in.

And I haven't read wages of whiteness in 20 years, but I always remember that was the book that really drove it home to me when I was younger. Because he goes through the ways in which Irish immigrants were performing this kind of, of like long time rootedness in in American culture in insulting African Americans or or others that had been in literally in on North American soil decades and their families have been there much longer than these recent immigrants who would then perform like go back to your country and stuff like this which we see today you know there's those reports that today of angry white supremacist yelling at you know Navajo and stuff like this like go back and it's like

God think about and of course people go think about it and it's your first response, but that's not what it's there for, right? And this is the, this is part of it. It's a concept of dominion, which I go much more in depth about of, of who has the right to hold sovereignty over the land. And, and I go through the Canadian context of the show, basically they invent a legal fiction that looks objectively neutral, the Supreme Court of Canada, invents this legal fiction of underlying title that is just basically a doctrine of discovery or terranolius you know these ideas that when europeans showed up they just have the rights of the land then it's just coded in a neutral language of a legal fiction and then i talk

about how it's coded as a kind of entitlement and then one last thing that that i was thinking a bit about as i was reading in the wake of this is uh i i like to pick up books from activists from the 60s and 70s and organizers from the 60s and 70s who subsequently do stuff like right history like, you know, Lance Hill wrote a book. He's from the Sojourner Truth Organization. One of their members from the South, or he had been, he'd relocated the South, something along those lines. And he wrote a book about the Deacons of Defense, which is an excellent book. And then I read the book for Us in the World Wind recently, and I saw that Kwando Kinshasa wrote a book about, it's called Black Resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the Civil War, which is a great book.

but it's marred by the publisher really didn't do any copy editing of it which is a nightmare so i really i i feel for kinshasa as a writer myself just to have someone take that to publication without doing their due diligence and copy editing is a nightmare but kinshasa really says one of those entitlements we always have to remember is the right to set the terms of recognition and and and in this regard i think we still see this today um in ways that say especially this is the critique that comes up in the critique of recognition that I talk about a little bit in my book, and that's influenced a lot by Kooltart again and red-skinned white masks saying, you know, one of the last things that comes with this is always in Canada with the negotiation between

indigenous communities and their particular rights in what are supposed to be nation-to-nation talks. The terms of those talks are always set on terms favorable to the Canadian or the Canadian government or the Canadian state. And so, you know, there's still. a kind of built-in idea that even if there's supposed to be some kind of, they call it reconciliation up here, is that this reconciliation is going to be done at the set by the terms of debate or the terms of discussion and recognition by this kind of concept of the settler colonial hegemony. Absolutely, yeah. And I love that tying in of whiteness with a deep, profound sense of entitlement. And we see that play out in a billion different ways. I mean, you can even

talk about some of the anti-mask protest as a part of that, but then just generally the contributions of De Bois. Rev. Left is going to do more work on De Bois coming up soon, too, for people that really want to learn more about him, because I think such an important figure, not only with a sort of general Marxist analysis, but with that analysis of race and whiteness and how it plays in to the overall structures of capitalism, et cetera. So more work to come on that. But moving away from individual figures and to some other arguments in your book. In Chapter 4 specifically, you do talk about and defend anti-fascism and even, you know, militant anti-fascism as a form of community self-defense. Do you want to flesh out that argument and just talk about the points you put out

in favor of that idea? Yeah, I just, I think it's an important part of the book. And it was something that I found as I got deeper and deeper into the argument, Chapter 4 specifically about launching Nazis. And so I needed to say, well, what's the ground of this? And I found, I did some of this, I already had an interest in some of this before going into it. And then once the book was finished, I spent a lot more time reading up about concepts of community self-defense. And I really just, I just want to sit at the level of a couple of things I think that are really important today that are mentioned in the book that I think are important right now, especially. is the first is I really want to stress that I think Robert F. Williams' short book, Negros with Guns from 1962, is really important for thinking about this. And I was searching quite a bit to try to find a kind of link to say he must have been referenced at some point in early, like, you know, anti-racist action, like ARA stuff in the 1990s or even earlier.

And I just, I could not find, I just couldn't find it in a certain way in the historical record, at least here. And the reason is a lot of this, actually, as people have pointed out to me, it did exist in the ephemera of pamphlets and flyers and things. Scott Crowe, who writes about this, he has a book that he edited called Setting Sites. Subsequent to publication, he got in contact with me and said, you know, there were some pamphlets that were published that he doesn't have access to still. But he said, you know, I remember these being around in the late 1990s. So Williams is an interesting link between the civil rights movement. Like he had read Phonon, I think, by the time that this was in there. There's some reference that seems very clear that he's talking about this.

He was interesting because I just want a couple of the key points is community self-defense, especially when he come out of his work here, it challenges some of the things that sometimes are common sense views of self-defense and concepts of violence is that we very commonly come into philosophy with a default view that defines, you know, there's an exclusive monopoly of violence practice by the state, and I'd like to challenge that by noting that Williams writes, and, you know, even though I don't buy the Viberian definition, there's still some underlying arguments sometimes you lapped into, and Williams really challenged that. He writes that, you know, community self-defense practiced by black communities,

challenges, quote, the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists, end quote. And for me, that was important because it helped convey another idea that settler state hegemony isn't necessarily always going to work out in the favor of bourgeois institutions or even in institutions like the police or whatever in the sort of so-called legal institutions or constitutional institutions that we have. And in fact, this monopoly of violence is racialized much more. And I mean, there's lots of research on this, but it was just the power of Williams' sort of straightforward critique here of Weber. Is that the monopoly here, if you say monopoly of violence practiced by the state, you're already not ready to really get at the core of the settler state hegemony stuff that I think we really need to get at. So this is me sort of sub-tweeting or criticizing a lot of philosophy and a lot of my peers in this regard.

And then I think a couple other things that are really important, especially for militant organizing, is that Williams is important. because all the way back in 1962, Williams refuses the idea that there's a public-private distinction in terms of community self-defense or armed self-defense. And so there's a great book that's a great introduction for this by Charles Cobb Jr., this non-violent stuff will get you killed. And it opens with this kind of story of an activist sitting down, an organizer sitting down in Martin Luther King Jr.'s house, and they're like, whoa, whoa, don't sit there because that's where the shotguns are.

And he gets up and he goes over to a different seat. No, no, no, the handguns are underneath there and, you know, you don't want to get shot. And it's conveyed. And the thing is, is even when I tell people this kind of story, the immediate way they recognize it is King believed in a private right to self-defense that he didn't believe fit with the nonviolence in public. And even in Williams, we see that challenge that Williams refused. He said, look, you arm yourself when you go out in public. And that's going to stop violence because much of this violence happens because racist. think there's no consequence because they're not going to face any legal consequences.

This is the Cops and Clan go hand in hand kind of stuff, which is absolutely true in 1962 in Monroe, North Carolina, where he's talking about this. And so, you know, that's important. But there's also an aspect where he says, you know, they don't feel it. They don't fear any retribution for this kind of thing. And not even using self-defense, but the very idea that all of a sudden there's going to be consequences for violence. It's going to push a lot of people out of that. And that's one of the basic ideas. You know, Mark Bray talks about it, and I cited in there,

is that kind of idea that your casual far-right person that wants to go to a rally, when there's a cost to trying to show off that you're a Nazi in public and you're going to go, wait a second, maybe there's social consequences for this, and it's going to prevent you from, it's going to dissuade you from doing that. And that's a world where there's fewer Nazis marching in the street is better than one where there's more.

And so, you know, I absolutely think that's important. And the last thing that I want to challenge here out of this that comes out of this discussion of community self-defense, and I really wish I'd put it this straightforward in the book. I was writing up some notes trying to think about this here. The common sense notion, just the most straight-up way to put it, is there is a continuity between the use of self-difference. defense and the police. So basically, you use self-defense because the police aren't there. There's a continuity between your actions and standing your ground and the kind of like castle defense and the broader norms of society. And that needed, that is a racist, white supremacist

concept of community self-defense that won't help marginalized in beleaguered communities. And the militant notion of self-defense, I mean, it'll help them legally speaking. But in terms of the actual social use of community self-defense is that is organized in light of police antagonism and so it's not just oh this is a continuity of oh the cops just didn't happen to be present when I needed to use self-defense it is that there is a direct antagonism between the police and your community and that you need to organize in order to defend yourselves not only against racists that aren't imbricated in institutions but racist that um racist that are in fact, so that aren't an R. So you're fighting again, it's a kind of three-way fight thing in the

idea of you're fighting racist and institutions and a racist institution of policing. At the same time, you're also trying to prevent violence from extra legal people, practicing the monopoly of violence by white racists, basically. Absolutely. Yeah, so much great stuff there. A couple points I want to hit on really quick and just sort of reiterate is that throughout American in history, fascists have always been cowards. They never won a fair fight. Back in the Klan days, they would mob up, put hoods on

and attack at night when black folks were sleeping. To this day, they participate in acts of cowardly terrorism and ambush attacks that are never, ever even close to a fair fight. And so when people on the left or black communities, indigenous communities, when they arm up and they're like, okay,

you want to meet us on that level, we're ready to fight back, you know, fascists are much less likely to come out of the woodwork. And so that cowardice at the center of fascist whiteness I think really needs to be emphasized. And then just to reiterate your point on anybody who believes that, well, I don't believe in violence from the left or right because the state should have a monopoly on violence. That's sort of a centrist liberal take. Well, once you understand that the state is not neutral, once you understand that the state operates in the interests of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capital, then there is that argument about the state being neutral and their, Therefore, it deserves the monopoly on violence completely falls to pieces.

And so that whole liberal illusion, I think, is worthy of destroying. And then just the last point, Mark Bray and Scott Crow, both people you mentioned, are previous Rev Left guests, friends of the show. So people that want to go hear their own episodes here on Rev Left can definitely do that. We're big fans of both Mark and Scott for sure. So moving on, and we've talked about this all throughout this conversation, which is settler colonialism and the role it plays in fascism. And in the last chapter of your book, you really focus on this.

And you quote, Roland Kishenna Robinson, saying, quote, a socialism, whether Marxist or anarchist, that does not at the deepest possible level engage with and seek to combat the fact of settler colonialism can only result in its own reconfiguration of the arrangements of settler power into a new form, nominally, in the hands of the working class, end quote. Can you talk a little bit?

more about whiteness, settler colonialism, and their intrinsic relationship to fascism? Yeah, part of my motivation was, again, in organizing at the time when I started working on this book, Robinson's essay circulated quite a bit of a decolonial perspective on anti-fascism. The version I'm working with was a revised version, so I can only think of that one, and I can't remember so much about the earlier version. So I'm only going to speak to the more recent one in that regard is part of my motivation was to respond to Robinson's criticism. There's an aspect to his work that's is very pessimistic about prospects on the left. And so I wanted to say, look, I want to meet that challenge that you're putting here,

but then also say there are ways where they can do this. And again, that comes out of my own background in working with anti-fascist groups, but then also working with indigenous rights groups and moving back and forth between the two. And I don't want to say there isn't, in fact, lots of debate. I mean, like, there's plenty of principal criticism and there's plenty of terrible arguments that go back for a long time. You know, like there's the, what is it? It's the volume edited by Ward Churchill, like Native Americans and Marxism or something, which just is completely unhelpful. And there's plenty of ways where that argument wasn't, you still see versions of that.

But I wanted to engage straightforwardly with it. And I thought that there was an aspect to this that would be very important. The first part was, I think it tells, looking at settler colonialism helps us understand an important part of what militant anti-fascism is up against. At the same time, I think that for American audiences, there's still, again, I encounter mainly academic circles where I think this is in fact much more prevalent. There's a kind of idea that the main paradigm of understanding racial oppression is constituted along the line. of anti-blackness. And I think Americans and still quite a few Canadian leftists still try to put something like indigenous rights in that paradigm, when the issue of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession and issues of sovereignty and nationhood are different. And they're irreducible

to that paradigm. And in fact, it's more important to try to understand both an anti-black paradigm of white supremacy and an anti-indigenous paradigm of white supremacy, operative in both places. So it's not like Canada gets a pass for anti-black racism. It's got problems there too. And in the same way in reverse, the U.S. has both aspects going with that. And I think it's important to say we need to be able to build a concept of militant anti-fascism and revolutionary struggle that responds to that. And of course, I think that's in a process of building and not something where we just have sort of principles we can point to. And I'm just trying to contribute to that particular part of the discussion when it comes to that.

For the analysis of settler colonialism, I point back to Du Bois, as you know, who talked about the wages of whiteness. But again, in Black Reconstruction, he seems to have dropped the other aspect of whiteness as possession and dominion. And I look at critics subsequent to him who have identified how the westward expansion of the U.S. and Canada it can help us understand not just the way in which the wages of whiteness worked as part of labor history, but part of settler colonial expansion. When settlers acted as citizen deputies of settler colonialism, and one thing I really want to reiterate about how deep this can run is, you know, we have lots of, when I was reading the sort of history of this kind of material

and talking to people about this, you know, there's lots of people who immigrate, their families immigrated in the late 19th century, early 20th century, whose experience of Americanism or Canadianism is the experience of being a citizen deputy of settler colonialism. They immigrated and immediately went west. And so their concept of this is this kind of nationalism they might portray is deeply rooted in this settler colonial project. And you really have to start that needs, you know, ruthless criticism to start on doing that. A real concept, especially, you know, we see this in white supremacists and racist, far-right groups, especially in the Pacific Northwest where I live,

is kind of, you know, we work the land or, you know, it's so deeply embedded that many of them don't even have the idea that indigenous populations were there, indigenous nations and communities were there before them in Idaho or Washington or Oregon, and I'm deliberately naming these particular places in the Pacific Northwest, because that's, you know, people occasionally fall in love with, you know, M and Bundy will say something and people will go, oh, yeah, you know, Bundy, look at him, he's supporting BLM and even the far right does. And it's like, no, he's still deeply rooted in indigenous dispossession in his ideology. So he's not a hero of this. And you absolutely should not be falling for this kind of crap when it comes down to it. Because it's, again,

more of the rejection it's a more of the you reject that red-brown alliance stuff but it's deeply rooted and we need to have a concept of that and again the other part about this is settler colonial hegemony is part of bourgeois democracy and liberalism in north america and it's you can't extract it from that and say we can find a better form of liberalism or democracy because every step along the way especially when you look at the ways in which it had to the liberal had to come up with concepts of why is it that in fact you can continue to dispossess indigenous communities every step along the way they're laundering white supremacy and and settler colonial white supremacist force as objective right. And so there's and so finally I'll say

two other things. First is I have some work going forward where I'm trying to look at as I talk about it in this book I'm really looking at you know militant anti-fascism combating you know white supremacists when they are socially mobile in the streets and as you know like far generation identity and other far right groups that aren't institutionally um rooted they're relatively autonomous and then i'm this really means at some point i need to push back if i'm looking at this hegemony and look deeper at the kind of idea of a kind of white uh petty bourgeoisie because it's very common that you'll read these descriptions where it's the petty bourgeoisie that plays such a prominent role in fascism, even in the historical analyses. And when I was

rereading the Marxist Civil War in France, I found this passage, and I'm just going to read it. And this one really, it becomes, if you take the word imperialism out and you put the word settler colonialism in, then it becomes a kind of impetus for looking at this that I find to be extremely fascinating if we can work on it. He says, imperialism is at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle-class society, so, you know, the petty bourgeoisie, had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital. And I find this to be, that's the end of the

quote, I find this to be an extremely interesting passage in the sense that if you look at the way in which there's this kind of settler colonial ideology of this kind of re-territorialization and possession of land and various other things is there's a way in which we can understand this settler colonial project in the way the petty bourgeoisie gets it is it is it is this kind of picture of emancipation from a kind of fantasy of feudalism in a way they also convey it as a kind of liberation from wage labor as well but then at the same time from the ruling class, right, bourgeois society, this ends up being, in fact, counterpoint is this is still a mode of the social integration of labor by capital.

And so this is where I think we can start seeing like there's a misrecognition in petty, the petty bourgeois kind of sees a certain kind of freedom in this and they misrecognize where their oppression is coming from. Anyway, I got to work this out, obviously. This is a huge issue. I just found that. I was like, if I could read this somewhere, I'm going to read this, and here we go. Absolutely.

And the second thing, and concluding on this point, the history of settler colonialism, as we're encountering here, means that we're never going to have an easy time drawing a kind of line where we just say, oh, fascism is here. So what I'm doing is I'm flipping the, very commonly the discourse, which is something along the lines of, is it here or is it not here? How is it, how is it implicated? How is it not? because what I want to do is I want to recognize, you know, in this, there's the black radical

tradition and the indigenous radical tradition. You know, they're both talking about things like internal colonies and fascism for internal colonies and, you know, liberalism for everyone else and things like this. I want to be able to reintegrate something like that. At the same time, I want to get away from something that I don't like, which is liberal philosophers of fascism. And here I'm going to say I'm Bertha Echo and Jason Stanley. They kind of present something like a checklist and it's like, well, is this one of the things that fascism is this one of the, you know, we tick the box. Well, this looks authoritarian and is there a thing where there's a, there's some racism and some gender, you know, gender oppression. And this is about competing

social forces. And it's about the fact that this long history of settler colonialism, complicates the idea where we could just say oh now it's here right and i think you know readers may get frustrated by this because you'll find it very commonly i'll talk mostly about the far right and i won't spend a lot of time calling people fascists largely in that same sense of i want to challenge people to think about well what are the terms that we want to look at here and then finally one last thing that i really wish people would stop and it just has really started getting going since since May, I just, we need to dispense with analogies to Germany because there's lots of people, oh, here's the moment. Remember in Germany when this happened, now it's happening in the

U.S. and again, it's like you're just ignoring the treatment of black Americans or indigenous people, the black community or the indigenous community, you're ignoring various other things that are going on. And then there's always this implication that you know sort of is in this underlying sort of American exceptionalism, where liberals managed to treat, obviously not only socialism and communism as a kind of outside agitator ideology, which they've been doing for ages, as you know. They also somehow treat white supremacy and fascism, like it's also this kind of imported political ideology. And sure, look, the swastikas and the various other regalia and other bullshit that these guys fetishize is imported in a way, obviously. But, you know, there's lots

of white supremacy, I mean, white supremacy is not an import in North America's settler colonialism. That's just, it's not. Exactly. And yeah, that whole idea of like making the analogies between Nazi Germany and the U.S. and like that is very much indicative, as you said, of the sort of checklist mentality. I hope here's another checklist we can say, you know, fascism is growing again. And then also just to complicated or even just, I think, to deepen this whole conversation is a George Jackson's concept of sort of being post-fascist. Like fascism has already won in America, and we're sort of in a post-fascist struggle. And I'm going to do more work on George Jackson, too, because I haven't read the entirety of his

work to flesh out that idea, but I want to do more work on it for sure. Ultimately, I sort of want to end this conversation with, what do you hope people take away from your book? And then you can also plug where listeners can find you and all three of your books online. two things that I would hope people would take away actually quite a few things because you can see I'm arguing with a liberal anti-fascist quite a bit here but I'm not going to say that they're probably your main listenership I'd hope that they would take the challenge seriously but from a militant perspective who I'm going to say is going to be much more in line with your

listenership is I think the first thing is it's it's a plea to take settler colonialism and these analyses seriously as you have seen in the book there's a gigantic citation apparatus in there because I want people to go back to the sources if they're so inclined and look at the stuff and the material and deal with that. And I'd hope that one other thing we could say is there's a couple other parts that kind of move very quickly that I hope can be helpful in understanding the present moment. One of them is, and I'll just suggest this, is I propose a settler, what I'll call a kind of a settler colonial thesis, an understanding of far-right movements, but whether they're going to be insurgent or whether they're going to be system

loyal. And this is one of the main questions that animates a lot of the literature right now as we're looking at far right movements seem to be very system loyal. Subsequent to the 1970s and sometime in the 1970s they seem to be very system oppositional. This is one of the major debates right at the beginning with Sakai and Lyons especially because, you know, and this comes from STO, sojourner truth organization and Ken Lawrence and a lot of other work from the early 80s, so I want to give credit where credit is due. I kind of give a thesis here and say, this can help us understand, settler colonialism can help us understand. Far right movements, this is the thesis. Far right movements are system loyal when they perceive that the

entitlements of white supremacy can be advanced within bourgeois democratic institutions, like the 1960s, for instance, in the clan and legalized segregation. And they become insurgent when they perceive that these entitlements cannot. And I just, I hope that if we're looking at the contemporary phase, we could say something like, you know, we're looking at a lot of just outright police brutality. I would argue, perhaps, that we could understand what's going on is the Trump administration is making a play of saying this kind of outright police brutality is trying to make a play that the white supremacy that is radicalizing the non-system loyal and insurgent groups. Like, you know, a lot of the far-right online stuff is radicalizing fairly quickly, like the

Boogaloo movement and various other accelerationists. We might also understand this idea that there's this outright police brutality as being a kind of pitch to pull them back into the ambit of the system to say, you know, we're advancing your cause here for that, no matter how that pans out. One last thing I want to say that is a shortcoming to the book that I'd like to point out is a lot of this looks at race, and I'd like readers if they read, this and they dig it. The next thing you can think about that I've been looking at, and this comes out of organizing and talking to a lot of comrades that I feel that I sort of gesture

at the book but don't get to develop is no matter how this plays out right now in contemporary times, and no matter how the kind of struggle of them in the far right in the streets, however that works out, is I really think it's important to notice as time has gone on. And before COVID-19, this was something that was actually very clear. And I think we were tracking in Canada quite a bit. And I want to say this is, even if it doesn't quite work out along the lines of racism for them or xenophobia, is that the far right, because it fights to re-entrenched relationships of hierarchy and oppression that already exist in society, they'll also exploit transphobic moral panic to their own ends. Not that they aren't transphobic and trans misogynistic, and I'm not saying, I mean, they are both transphobic and trans misogynistic. but this is an avenue that's already available to them into society that they're exploiting. So I would like readers, hopefully, if they read the book and they enjoy it and they like it and they find it useful,

and you know, I'm thinking about this, and I hope more of us can think about it, is that both trans-exclusionary feminists and fascists, they're exploiting discourses of white ciswomen and children's safety to advance their agendas. And it gives them an opportunity to present this in the name of feminism. And I think this is really important to keep an eye on because if racism and xenophobia failed to provide a path to normalization for the far right, if Trump fails to hold power after November and we go on to Biden, and then this is actually a lot of the liberal anti-fascists, so let me like, oh, he defeated fascism and off we go. I really want people to remember that we can expect that these groups are both going to continue to radicalize and continue to be a third. threat, but then portions of them are also going to regroup around other aspects that are going to be harder for people to see because they aren't in the traditional paths. And one of those is trans misogyny. I think we were starting to see this quite a bit in so-called turf discourses

and free speech discourses in Canada. I think we see it in the UK. And I've also seen some research from some comrades who haven't had stuff published where they're tracking this stuff about, you know, reaching across the aisle between turfs and fascists that their common moral panic. And so I really want, you know, if you pick up the book and you like it, I would say, I want you to get serious about settler colonialism, and that's important. And I'd hope that, you know, the best reader is one who's critical in the sense that you can identify the same things I've just mentioned and other failings and kind of build from there forward for that.

If you're interested in the book, I would suggest that listeners can order it through leftwingbooks.net, which is the online bookstore for Chris Webbedev Books. And you'll get my pamphlet, The Politics of the Blockade, which again is about wet-to-wetan solidarity movements in Vancouver, basically, British Columbia, because that's kind of, I'm writing from where I was writing commentary about my experience in that. That was only February of this year, even though it feels like a decade ago. Their shipping policy is that it's free in North America if you spend $50. So I know that means you've got to buy another book. like you got to buy Matt Lyons book or something like that to get that 50 bucks or whatever,

get it up to $50. But I think that's rewarding if you have the funds available. And then I'm on Twitter. So if you for some reason want to converse, that's it, Devon Z. Shaw. You can follow me there and I like to talk when I have time. And I'm not just doom scrolling. Absolutely. Yeah, I love those points so much.

That point about the Trump administration acting as a mechanism by which to recoup the fascist sentiment back into the system, I think is fascinating. That connection between fascists and turfs and their moral panic is fascinating. In this whole book, especially for a philosophy nerd like me, who is also into the anti-fascist movement, I loved it. I highly recommend it. I'll link to all the stuff mentioned in the show notes so people can find it as quickly as possible. And yeah, thank you so much, Devin, for coming on the show and discussing this work. You have a home here at RevLeft. Anytime you want to come on, talk about any of your other work or any of your future work.

So thank you so much and keep up the great work. We'll be monitoring you and your output going forward, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. And keep up the good work as well. All these police executions have really been fucking with my execution. Haven't been able to focus on music. Keep thinking about niggas who met their conclusions too early from demons who chose not to see him as human. What you used to back their delusion?

Don't want they hear, no internal solution. The system ain't broken. That's just an illusion. Pleasing I caught a shit woke I haven't stepped in the booth in the mud My head been real fucked up I'm not in the move for jokes 8 minutes 40 seconds he choked

I watched them go Three of them covered a killer and cloak So many memories that shit evoke I don't seen too many niggas get smoked This ain't my lyrical lane So I had to swear to speak on the pain Typically I do not rap in my feelings But lately this all that I got on my brain

I hesitate to embrace my songs Because if it's not carefully done in this lane but George and Brianna and Tony Medday that hit me so hard I couldn't abstain Reading been giving me clarity through all this media sanctioned pollution I don't want a hit by no riots and looting as long as them badges are line and shooting

lately been spending some time refuting opinions of people who think we're the enemy I had to take a step back and remember that I'm gonna be doing this shit till the end of me long road ahead of me and I've been running on fumes I'm looking to fill out my tank selling these sonnison and then I deposit the bread and mutual lay like the bank

promise I'm not at the center and none of this honor to be at these activist flank. Whole lot of people been showing me love, but honestly, I'm not the person to think. Take it from people more seasoned and smarter than I am, something you must understand. It's if you're not using your voices

to highlight the movement, you're drawing the line in the sand. If you're not actively helping dismantle the system, I definitely know where you stand. If you think a couple of shares in the square is enough, you part of the problem at hand. All these police executions have really been fucking with my execution.

Having been able to focus on music, you think about niggas who met the conclusions too early. from demons who chose not to see him as human where you used to back the delusion don't want to hear no internal solution the system ain't broken that shit's an illusion you're just an illusion