Rev Left Radio - Trotsky on Fascism (and Lessons for us Today)

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

In this episode, Alyson and Breht welcome Brendan back on the show for the first time in a few years. Together, we dive deep into Leon Trotsky’s Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, a sharp and urgent intervention written in the shadow of the Nazi rise to power. We unpack Trotsky’s class analysis of fascism, the role of the petite bourgeoisie, his searing critiques of both sectarian isolationism and liberal class collaboration, and his insistence on the United Front as the only viable revolutionary response. Alongside historical context, we explore in depth whether Trotsky’s framework still applies to today’s far-right movements, neoliberal authoritarianism, Trump's Oligarchic second term, and a decaying capitalist order teetering on the edge. What does fascism look like in 2025—and what must we do to resist it? Outro Song: May All The Lower Realms Be Empty by Friends in Real Life ----------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace slash Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we are finally going to tackle a text by Leon Trotsky. It's something that people have asked for for a while. I don't think we've ever gotten around to doing one. And we figured his famous text, fascism, what it is, and how to fight it would be a great entry point into Trotsky's work. And I think a very timely topic for us to wrestle with. So it's not just Allison and I today. It's also previous guest of the show, been on several, several times, but has not been on for quite a while, our friend and comrade Brendan.

Brendan, would you like to introduce yourself a little bit? Hi, I'm Brendan. Yeah, I think I've been on, I don't know, probably close to a dozen episodes, but I don't think I've been on since, funnily enough, the capital insurrection, which we kind of talked about neo-fascism and how we got there then. I think I was on an episode about Gramsci at one point. I mean, an episode about ideology that were both probably pretty relevant to the conversation at hand as well. Yeah. Brendan goes back to the very early days of Rev. Left, but it's a crime that it's been so long since you've been back on. So we're glad to rectify that today. Happy to be back. Absolutely. Happy to have you. So we're going to talk about Trotsky's take on fascism. We're going to first dive into the text itself, kind of help people understand it. I assume most listeners haven't read it or read it recently. It's actually pretty short and it's totally free online. I think it's like 50 pages you can find it. You know, free versions of it online. But we're going to explain it so you don't have to do the reading. talk about the main points and the main lines of argument and analysis. And then we're going to get in in the second half to like thinking about what it means for us today because we are at this critical juncture in human history and capitalism's history and American imperialist history that things seem to be in a state of perpetual decay and right wing movements not only here but

around the world are on the rise. And so this is a really important, I think, juncture and history to wrestle with these ideas and for us on the radical revolutionary left to really be clear about what fascism is because you know people overuse the term it's thrown around all the all the time i think trump called marxist fascists in the last several years we've heard you know anti-fascists are the real fascist liberals call everything fascist and um it's really kind of lost it's it's thrust as an accusation um and and so by being very clear about what it is how it may manifest we can understand its rise and hopefully we can also be able to be in a better position hopefully to to combat it more effectively and for that we go into history and learn from that so

let's go ahead and get into it and um the first question is can you both help us understand the historical moment in which the text was written so before we get into the context content i want to get into the context like what was the the historical moment what were the major debates at the time and how did this text sort of emerge from very specific conditions? Yeah, I can gesture at that briefly to open it up. So this text itself is interesting because it's actually not a single coherent text, right? This is a text that is compiled from pieces of Trotsky's other writing and was compiled and published after his death. So what we're seeing here is not just like one unified work, but a selection of, you know, ideas that come out of Trotsky related to fascism.

I suspect, based on some of our conversations before the show, Brendan has a lot more historical context for the individual pieces than I do, but I will broadly say that most of these texts, I believe, were published after the sixth common-term Congress, which essentially established the idea of the third period, this idea that there was an eminent socialist revolution that was coming, proletarian revolution was on the horizon. It was very, very close to happening. This represented a sort of shift to the left. with a strong opposition to, you know, broadly reformist projects and also a theory of fascism, which we'll get into in more detail, that really theorized fascism as in a continuation

with social democracy, where in social democracy was meant to be understood as a left wing of fascism. And because of this third period framing of the imminence of socialist revolution, there was a idea that actually the main thing holding back the revolution, was social democracy itself and the various social democratic parties. And so a specific orientation was taken there. And this text is very much arguing against that orientation. It's very much intervening in debates at that time about how the communist movement needs to relate to social democracy and how fascism fits into all of that. Again, these come from several texts. So they each have like a more specific historical context. But I would say that's the broad framing I would

like to highlight, and we will obviously get into all the details of social fascism as a theory, the United Front, et cetera. But that's kind of some stage setting on my end, at least. Yeah, Brendan. Yeah, I would add to that specifically. I think that a lot of this stuff is written in a couple different years. I think basically, like we're looking 30 to 34. And I can't remember off the top of my head, but I don't necessarily think that they're written in this work. in the order that they were actually written. So if you want to do a deep dive, I'm a big fan of the historical part of historical materialism,

and it's never a bad idea to go back and read things in order if you do feel like something is speaking to you. A lot of what he's writing, to piggyback what you said about this being an intervention. Specifically, he's kind of trying to talk specifically to German in French communists, because he's very concerned that the fascists are going to take power. Basically, the way he predicts that it will go down in Germany is virtually exactly how it went down, which at the time, both the Social Democrats, the Comintern, the Communist Party of Germany,

they were all convinced that they were on their eyes and fascism was on the way down. And so I think his intervention there is very accurate. I think France is a little bit more complex. He's not quite on the nose, but certainly we see kind of how World War II plays out. France does eventually become fascist, even if it's somewhat of a puppet government. It's not without quite a large number of collaborators. And it's not purely Germany's invasion that led to that circumstance. So he's really trying to push the communist parties to take a a strong stand against fascism as the primary threat. I think he's trying to get them, you know, for some reasons, obviously, are a little personal to kind of move away from kind of the common turn, which really had been oriented towards what was best for the USSR since at least, I'd say, the second Congress. I don't know the specifics of every Congress very well, but even in the second Congress when, you know, Trotsky and Lenin were very involved, they're really

trying to figure out how to make the USSR stable in some degree and they have a civil war to win and things like that. And so there's also a lot of ideological void basically since World War I where a lot of the socialists are trying to re-position themselves and the Bolsheviks for a lot of, I think, very fair reasons think that they were in the best position to kind of dictate to the various socialist and eventually more specifically communist parties how they need to act yeah and we'll definitely get into that in a couple questions here and you did mention the german revolution this is 1930 through 1934 this these texts are these essays are being written and as alison pointed out their compilation they're

not actually a proper specific text would start to finish that i kind of without trying to made it seem like in the very beginning but um alison and i also recently did an episode on the german revolution 1919 if you're interested in going to check that out because that's about a decade before a lot of these essays are written and obviously just gives a good historical context for the German side of this whole equation. So let's go ahead and move forward and get into the content itself. A huge part of Trotsky's analysis as a Marxist is, of course, class analysis. So what is Trotsky's class analysis of fascism?

How did he see different social classes, particularly the petty bourgeoisie contributing to its rise? Yeah, so I think Trotsky's kind of starting point, or at least the starting point of this compilation, kind of begins by saying that not all counter-revolutionary dictatorship is fascist. And I think that's really something I find accurate in general. I don't even think really Franco was a true fascist. I think so but it is a counter-revolutionary dictatorship, first off. And that's, I think, step one. identifies it as spontaneous, which is maybe something I find a little bit of an issue with, but he mass movement, which I think is pretty accurate. He kind of talks about the fact that it has a new leadership. I think that that's really important, both in terms of how we need to look at fascism, but actually how fascism looks at itself. And I think it will be relevant. And then we're kind of discussing the contemporary situation. You know, he doesn't really go into it, but a lot of in Italy, especially, the fascist leadership comes out of socialist.

in the Italian movement, who were maybe on the right, but some of them were actually initially against the imperialist war. And for whatever reasons, they decide socialism's not working. They're not really interested in the bourgeoisie dominating society anymore, etc. I think you can really compare and contrast the fascist movements of various countries, but certainly the leadership tends to be new. These aren't really aristocrats. It's plebeian in origin, he says, which I think is his way of kind of, of making it like he doesn't want to use the word proletariat but it's important to note that like this isn't strictly just the petite bourgeoisie they're just kind of the main base he says

they're kind of financed and directed by the big capitalist powers and this he's not really deviating that much from the common turn I think to a fault maybe they both see finance capital as as having maybe a little bit more power or at least in the driver's seat where there's maybe a little bit more of a contradiction. I don't know. Yeah, he's saying, yeah, Petit bourgeoisie, but with like a criminal element, a lumpen element,

and then a significant, if not, like, majority amount of the proletarian class is actually being drawn by, I guess, you can say, the gravity of the Petit Bouchoir. Yeah. So quickly, as I bridge over to Allison,

there's this mass movement element. There's different elements of each strata of classes that go over to, fascism, right? There's lump and proletariat aspects. There's big bourgeoisie aspects. It's really driven, obviously, by capitalism and need to defend itself, primarily from bottom up, movements that really challenge the core foundations of bourgeois rule, like socialism, communism, et cetera, but that the petty bourgeoisie, this sort of middle upper class,

the small business owner class, not big bourgeoisie, not properly proletarian, that they kind of, his argument, if I'm correct, is that, you know, the petty bourgeoisie makes up the sort of central core of the mass movement that is fascism. And that's a really important thing to stress because fascism does require this mass movement. And so if you're going to have a mass movement, you know, the big bourgeoisie is too limited in number to really form a mass movement. The proletariat is going to have many reasons to stand against fascism. And we'll get into that in a little bit later. So it's actually this petty bourgeois strata that actually forms the basis of that necessary mass movement. Allison, I'll hand it over to you.

Yeah, I think there are a couple things that I want to kind of just dive further in on. So I think the mass movement point is really important in something that I want to hit on because I think oftentimes when it comes to this question of whether or not a phenomenon, so political phenomena is fascist, that doesn't get wrestled with enough, right? And I think when we start to look at some of the governments that have been called fascist where that label might be misapplied, I think oftentimes the misapplication comes because you will have these very, we could say, authoritarian dictatorships that don't have a mass movement and support base. And that changes the dynamic somewhat. So I find Trotsky's emphasis on that really useful. I think this also really ties into the work that we've done in the past where Brett and I have talked about the three-way fight, where one of the things that I like, about the three-way fight people is that they emphasize the mass movement aspect of fascism very well, and the way that fascism isn't just like, oh, an organic expression of only what finance capital wants, right? There is something not revolutionary in it, but there is something populist in it, perhaps, that actually takes on a mass character, even in a counter-revolutionary direction. So I find that to be a very useful part of this. And then, yeah, I think the petty

bourgeoisie are interesting and important to wrestle with here. I think one of the interesting things about capitalism that we've talked about a lot is that capitalism is extremely prone to crisis, right? And the crises within capitalism are going to impact different class strata differently. And the petty bourgeoisie are very fascinatingly positioned within capitalism because their interests can kind of actually fluctuate over time between aligning with proletarian interests or aligning with big capitalist interests. And so the crisis creates this sort of instability in the petty bourgeoisie that I think Trotsky finds makes them particularly exploitable. Again, I think Brendan, you know, I actually agree. It's kind of interesting the degree to which Trotsky agrees with the common turn here that they're just sort of being directed by finance capital. But in that conception, the reason they can be directed

as such, and the reason they can be used as, you know, this kind of base for the fascist movement has to do with their susceptibility to actual crises in opposition to the large bourgeoisie. And so I think that's an important thing to focus on. I think a lot of Marxist theory tends to focus on the finance capital side or also even the Lumpin support for fascism. And those are there, those are present. Trotsky, when he talks about the base of fascism, says the slum proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie and to a certain extent the proletarian masses.

So he's also wrestling with the characterization beyond the peasant. bourgeoisie. But what I like about his account, I think, is that very big emphasis on how the middle classes fit into this. I find that particularly useful and to be one of the more unique features of this account. Yeah. And I think the social science kind of backs Trotsky up. I think he's really, he's really right about it, at least to an extent. And I would say something like he goes, you know, he points out that like in Italy, the peasantry is very involved. And if you look at Italy specifically, and I know this will come up later, but like in an early report to either the Communist Party or the Comintern, Gromfew's talking about how they're kind of two distinct fascisms. So there's the petite bourgeois one that kind of Mussolini is actually directly affiliated with from the cities.

And then there's also kind of a rural counter-revolutionary peasantry element that's kind of scared of the proletariat. And these are the ones who are being directed in Italy by basically a proto-bigagra, you know, the kind of the larger landowners. And that's, I think, not something that you're going to see in a place like Germany. But Trotsky does note this. And then I think, you know, if you look at some of the sort of Frankfurt School social research that they did, I mean, these are sociologists, anthropologists. they're incorporating psychology into their work. They're showing that, yeah, actually, a lot of the people who are afraid of being proletarianized, but also maybe have a fear of big business, are some of the people who are susceptible to fascism. Certainly the criminal element actually, I think, sometimes gets overemphasized, but they tend to really identify with it.

And I saw something on Reddit just coincidentally yesterday that made me think of this. Somebody said, was like, oh, I'm a two-time felon, so I can't vote, but I'm glad that, like, Trump is here and he's getting rid of the immigrants who are bringing all of this crime to this country. You know, this person just admitted that they're a two-time felon, but they're afraid of criminals. And that psychology, I think, is there. So I think, you know, Trotsky definitely has covered a big base, which is pretty smart. If we're talking about social science, because even he says that the working class itself is not heterogeneous. And either is the base for. for fascism, but I think that, you know, kind of petty bourgeoisie or like the Petit Bouchoir sort of middle class core is a big part of it. And he even says something about like the new middle classes, maybe being something that is susceptible to fascism or being able to constitute a part of that base. And I think that, you know, the Petit Bougoir, as Marxist tends to understand it, is kind of a thing of the 19th century. It doesn't exist in that way anymore. not very much, you know, like how many locally owned businesses are even around anymore, you know, so, so that sort, so Trotsky's even maybe seeing ahead of into neo-fascism, these sorts of people who are like professional or like, you know, salaried workers where, you know, you can't quite say that they need to sell their labor quite in the same way that a wage labor needs to. But essentially, you know, they're they're so close to being the proletariat. While, you know, having things like Ben, benefits and the ability to take vacations and stuff and, you know, look at, you know, some of, you know, I know, Brett has talked about this a little bit before. Some of the people who are, you know, at some of these, you know, kind of right-wing riots are not necessarily, you know, your standard working man as much as sometimes the media likes to betray them as such. Exactly. Yeah. And I think there's elements of the labor aristocracy that can be one over here. But I kind of like to get into a little bit more. And, you know, Brendan, you mentioned the word proletarianization into the psychology of the petty bourgeois. however we want to you know make those delineations and there are a little looser um in the modern world um you know it's not as simple as just saying the small business owners right that's just

an aspect of the petty bourgeois um but it's it's bigger than that and it kind of extends into what we would call maybe in the u.s wrongly but what is often you know called the upper middle class or something like that and that isn't always somebody that owns a business it can be somebody who is self-employed it could be somebody that's in a professional situation somebody in the labor aristocracy and um but the the psychology is if we take serious this idea that fascism is what arises when capitalism is under threat either in in crisis because of its own machinations and then you know in an economics crisis situation or um from a bottom up grassroots movement that threatens the core logic of the capitalist way of organizing society this middle this middle

area this middle petty bourgeois strata um has a material fear of being proletarianized right it doesn't want it there's downward pressure during crises so that that is the strata that has this downward pressure pushing them downward which generates fear and we know fear is tied to reaction deeply but they're also they're not proletarian ideologically right they're aspirationally they're often bourgeois or they want to join the big bourgeoisie their ideology and their aspirational goals are upward so at the same moment that there is materially downward pressure on them there is still this aspirational movement, whereas you and I and most of our listeners, we understand and conceive of ourselves as of by and from the working class, and we have working class political goals,

you know, we are ideologically, you know, militant partisans of our class. That's not true for this strata. But they also have this critique, and we, I think we can see this, we're going to get more into the American context as we go throughout this, but it doesn't hurt to dip into it now. A lot of the base of the Trump movement, and again, we're going to get into the nuances of that later. But you can see this element also having genuine critiques of big capital. And there's this immediate tension that arose within the Trump coalition that could be roughly called the Bannon-Elon split, where Bannon is representing this, this skeptical aspect of the Trumpian base towards the oligarchic elite. And Musk represents this unleashing of the oligarchic elite, this

faction within the ruling class that, you know, wants to seize this moment as an opportunity to coalesce power and wealth and solidify monopolies, et cetera. So that tension that we see between Bannon and Elon actually represent this deeper tension within the Bougoir, the Petty bourgeois psychology, where there is this genuine critique. And so you can see how part of that strata could be sliced off and won over by a militant working class movement if they're leaning more in that direction of critiquing big monopoly and that but you could also see how a fascist movement can mobilize that psychology and the fear and the downward material pressure being put on them to plus the aspirational goals of upward movement into the big bourgeoisie to militate against

this democratic left wing movement coming up because at the end of the day they don't see themselves really as workers they're they're at risk of becoming workers and that makes them scared but they self-conceive as as aspirational to the to the bourgeoisie proper or at least you know upward mobility is what they're after so that's a really interesting aspect i have some other points to make but alison i don't know if you have anything to say to either what brenden or i laid on the table so far yeah drawing on some of what you laid out i mean i think there's two layers to the psychology right i think one you've hit on like this ideological layer of this like upward movement ideology which i think it's worth saying in the united states is you know

much broader in scope than just the ideology of the petite bourgeoisie, right? Like, the idea of making it, you know, and by that we mean making it into something like the capitalist class, is like this very central ideological mechanism within how Americans self-conceptualized. So I think it is broader than that in some ways. But yeah, I think it is this interesting tension, right, between those aspirational goals and some genuine investment in the ideological promise that those things are achievable, alongside what absolutely is just a process of proletarianization, which is occurring. I think, like, to make that concrete, one of the things that's worth recognizing, at least about the situation in the United States, is that I think, Brendan,

you're very much correct, right? Like, the phenomena of the small business owner, right? Or the shop owner phenomenon has shrunk in the United States because a real concentration of capital into larger corporations because of acquisitions of smaller businesses and merger. them into larger businesses. Also now, because of the way that finance capital and VC finance specifically can take over businesses behind the scenes, I think all of this has really diminished the role of the petite bourgeoisie and American society. Even outside of like the more classical sense of petite bourgeoisie where we're talking about these business owners, within the realm of like the intelligentsia as well, I think we've seen broader proletarianization

occurring with the emphasis on contract and adjunct labor, a real emphasis on trying to move these positions that were traditionally within something like the cultural petite bourgeoisie into a more proletarianized worker-like position. And so there's real tension between that ideological aspirationism and the trends within American capitalism itself that I think produces some of the psychology that we're talking about. But I also think to be concrete, Like, really the susceptibility to economic crisis that comes from that move towards proletarianization is just huge, right? One of the things that I think, like, you can't understand the current Trump administration

and its success in the last election, you know, you can't understand it without is thinking about how small businesses were impacted by the pandemic, right? And obviously, I don't want to frame the pandemic as a purely economic crisis. It's not in the classical sense, although it accommodates economic crisis. But it really shows the way that large capital is able to weather the storm of something like lockdowns and shutdowns of economies compared to smaller businesses, which relied on very direct bailouts by the government in this particular case. And many still didn't survive after that. So I think it shows how even something like a more we would, I think we would tend

to conceptualize of a pandemic as like a natural disaster almost, can just really create the economic conditions that exert that kind of pressure. And I think the move to a sort of right-wing nationalist populism by the petty bourgeoisie in the United States kind of has to be understood in relation to that, right? That's sort of the main thing that I would add there if we want to try to understand this in the U.S. I would go on not to disagree, but to add another dimension because I think that we're all hitting a lot of the most important points is that there's a sort of I guess you could say like Petit, you know, there's some Marxists

who say that kind of the petite bourgeoisie actually has more of the bourgeois ideology or believes the bourgeois ideology more than the actual big bourgeois Z does, you know. I think one of my favorite shows to watch as a Marxist, funnily enough, I guess, in certain ways,

is White Lotus. But I think they understand certain things well. And so the second season is about sexual desire. And, you know, and infidelity and there's somebody who's who's a member of the kind of finance capital class and his friend who we went to college with has become recently rich because of you know tech right in a way that I think is actually pretty directly related to what we're seeing now and so they're

talking about cheating and the the new rich guy is like no way like and then the the still kind of new rich but old older rich person was like oh you know monogamy is a bourgeois idea. You know what I mean? And this is arguably the most bourgeois person. But, you know, there's a certain degree to which the true bourgeoisie, they don't, you know, need bourgeois ideology in the kind of classic sense, the sense that comes out of the Enlightenment and also out of Protestantism. I think those are kind of the two roots of like the bourgeoisie, I think, you know. So the kind of the bourgeois family structure is really important, I think,

and understanding fascism and why people are drawn to it, whether they're proletarian or whether they're rich. But especially if they're middle class, they buy into this, you know, the father is the provider, he is the authority, right? This really kind of ties into like a door now. And the authoritarian personality is they're finding that one predictability that somebody might have towards anti-democratic ideas,

fascist ideas, anti-Semitic ideas, a general tendency towards prejudice. And when they were studying Americans, they focused on like anti-black especially, but also looked at like, you know, homophobic views, anti-immigration views. I think what I see really relevant now is how effectively the right has weaponized anti-trans rhetoric because they're, you know, they create this outgroup, right, that is a threat to traditional values. And these people who are they attracted to somebody like Trump because it represents sort of in a Freudian way, you know, and I think we can take issue with how Freudian the Frankfurt School approaches it may be. But they're speaking to something that's fairly true. They want this father figure, right? And Trump is an authority and he's going to do whatever he needs to do because that's his right, right? Because he's the man of the house of the country. And that's attractive to these people, whether they're, you know, whether they're the dads or not. It's kind of this sort of like dynamic where someone who's been abused by their father but doesn't want to admit like in a in a specifically like a punitive way right and and and so they they don't have a model for for critical thought and and you know I know like a lot of us have our trauma but I think a lot of us on the left one thing a lot of us have in common is is we know how to disagree with authority and and the best way you know there's this

tendency at least according to like what the Frankfurt school are finding for people who are more susceptible to pro-democratic or revolutionary propaganda and less likely to hold or be susceptible to prejudice views is that they come from homes where if they have issues they vocalize them right if they have issues with their parent they say well this is my issue with my parent you know and i and i think there's something about that that's ideologically bourgeois outside of the economics not that it's unrelated but i think you know this sort of like nuclear family idea and threats to it play a very big role in the psychology of why people are attracted to fascism. And I think that is a kind of a petty bourgeois thing, even if your class is economically different for whatever reason. If that makes sense, I kind of rambled a bit. No, yeah. Makes complete sense. I think that's super fascinating. And yeah, all of that hits for me, and I have to check out White Lotus. I've been recommended that many times. I haven't checked it out. But I know it's a satirical

take on class dynamics for sure. And he sees in Scott Buddhism as a theme, Brad. You're going to love it. I got to get it. It does. But I love what you said about the bourgeoisie don't need bourgeois ideology. I think you're getting at something so interesting and so crucial about the psychology at play here that I think is really worth reflecting on.

I just really quickly, since we're on, I mean, we are Marxists, so we're lingering on the class question a little bit, which is fine. Sure. But I remember Allison and I just quickly, during COVID, our first episode that we were talking about the fallout, we were hyper articulating the process of proletarianization and how exactly this is going to play out, how it's going to increase in equality, how it's going to create the conditions for reactionary backlash, et cetera. And we've, I mean, we've just seen that exact thing play out. And now with a new recession looming, you know, I think we have to be very,

very cognizant and comprehensive about how these things play out, how we can fight back, how we can elevate people's consciousness and we were talking about you know the aspirational nature of the bourgeoisie and i think alison you mentioned that there's a a deep strain in american ideology where the proletariat themselves do not have class consciousness and instead have the aspirational psychology that would in in previous times in certain other contexts like trotsky's context european context with robust trade union movements robust communist movements that the proletariat would have been overwhelmingly and you know sort of inculcated with class consciousness in a way that the american proletariat for many reasons um you know um imperial profits um ideology all the all the things

that they don't have that level of class consciousness and so they have this as this aspirational proletariat which sides actually with forces of reaction over any democratic bottom up militant workers movement that would actually benefit them and so i think that's fascinating and i think there's also another layer here, which is when we talk about the lumpin proletariat, and in the racialized context of the United States, what elements of the lumpin proletariat side tend to or would be more likely to side with the fascist elements? It's the white lumpin.

And I think when you think of the black and brown lumpin proletariat, you see a genuine distance there between the ability to win over the white lumpin to a fascist reactionary movement and a racialized lumpin precisely because of the history and the material conditions that racialized people live in here that probably was not prominent in any similar way in the European countries 100 years ago. So again, the racial, the unique racial dynamics of the American culture and American history also shapes these strata in very interesting ways where you have aspirational white working class people who have the ideology more of a petty bourgeoisie and then you have these splits within the lump in themselves

that are a product of racialization from, you know, American, uniquely American conditions. So I think that's something that's certainly worth thinking about. Something I think is worth maybe mentioning is that, you know, part of why the Republicans were so jubilant and the Democrats so defeated after Trump won is that breaking it down demographically, he won gains in almost every single category. There are very few categories he didn't. And of course, you know, the more we apply, like, what I would hope a Marxist would, but certainly like an intersectional feminist view, you know, we can complicate that and like cut it in the smaller slivers. But some of the few groups who didn't make huge gains in, if really any at all, were actual union members, you know, people who are part of that, you know, economic bracket, but not union members went over to Trump, right? If you just like look at like white working class, right? But white working class who were members of unions did not make the same level of chum.

So that speaks to what Brett's saying about the class consciousness. If you break it down by race and gender, right, women were much less likely to go over to Trump than, you know, the male parts of whatever the racial demographics. So if you look at, you know, people of color, women of color did not really vote for Trump more than they did last time. Jewish people didn't really and trans people didn't really. Other than that, and I think specifically, like, Jewish women and black women voted more against Trump, you know? Any other demographic? Then they did the previous election. And different polls are showing different things, but the sociologist and me looked at a lot of them, right?

So I think that's speaking to a lot of the things that you're talking about, Brett, and more specifically, I think, giving us very specific reasons. And we know, like, if we break it down further at a place like Michigan, that, you know, the – the influence of Biden's support for like genocide is a clear factor that that kind of trumps a lot of other no irony intended sorry any other factor for a lot of voters for a lot of reasons but I think that's worth maybe mentioning too that the class consciousness and the racialization you can see that right and historical memory you know I think that's part of why even though a lot of the institutions are so pro you know this sort of like Zionist you know system, the majority of Jewish people are still not really voting for Trump, even though

they like, he likes to pretend that he's got like this huge support because he's so much closer to Netanyahu with Jews. That's not really how the votes are playing out. And I think that at the very least, there's a tendency to like hope for some degree of democratic pluralism. Interesting. Allison. Yeah. No, so I think there's a lot to build on there. I think the demographic aspect is interesting. I think one of the things that is concerning, right? And Brendan, and I think you gestured towards this, is that Trump did make some gains with racialized demographics, right? And in particular, you know, the Latino vote had some gains that happened for Trump.

And I think there's this difficulty in this American populist movement where I don't think it quite knows how much it wants to lean into explicit racialism as the basis of its kind of like ideological core, or how much it wants to build kind of like, weirdly like a multi- anti-racial citizenry-based kind of fascism. I think it's playing with both of those directions. But one of the things I think is interesting is that, yeah, there are groups who I think you're correct because of historical memory in many ways haven't been won over by Trump. And I think the union membership is actually really interesting one. But that doesn't mean there's not an

attempt by Trump and the Republicans to kind of hit some of these groups. And I think also really to try to make inroads to organize labor in ways that are somewhat complicated, I think, the Republicans, obviously, I think we would all agree, are not pro-labor in any meaningful way. But the extent to which they're trying to appeal to that sort of rhetoric with people like Josh Hawley, I think has kind of intensified since the last election. And unfortunately, within the leadership of the labor movement, I think there's a weird amount of tolerance for that. I think, you know, I don't want to fully get into Sean O'Brien as a figure, but like Sean O'Brien sitting down with Josh Hawley and affirming some of his anti-Nativist views,

I think does show the extent to which there's an attempt to break into the organized working class who have the higher level of consciousness. And it'll be interesting to see, like, to what extent that consciousness can inculcate them from what I believe will be an increased amount of propaganda from the right in this country, probably with some amount of collaboration from labor leadership, unfortunately, who are interested in how they can have a cozier relationship with the administration. So it is weird in the context of the U.S. I think we've alluded the question of if the U.S. is moving towards fascism or is fascist already or all of that. But assuming that, you know, there are fascist elements perhaps at play here, the exact ideological contours and the base it's going to establish for itself feels very unresolved at the moment in some interesting ways where we're seeing contestation taking place.

Yeah, I second all of that. I think it's really fascinating about the attempted right-wing inroads to the working class. but an economic program that is incredibly and increasingly oligarchic and hostile to working class. It's like how much can the culture war mystification win over elements and how much will class consciousness that is just fostered by virtue of being in the union, how much can that inculcate people against that allure attempt to, you know, lure them out of their class position and into like a cultural nativist posture? That's a fascinating thing to keep an eye on.

Yeah, to bring it back to Trotsky, he definitely talks about how the fascist leadership uses, you know, socialist demagoguery, I think, is what he says. And that's, I mean, that's clearly a thing, you know, and Trump's kind of offer of rebates from Doge and things like that, you know, like that. That's part of like trying to get as many working class people into their base as possible as well, because it does rely on that mass movement, right? Absolutely. Right. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. Now, another element of this text is Trotsky's position on the communists, Stalin, the common turn, his positions on social democracy, the bourgeois liberals, Popular Front versus United Front, etc.

So Trotsky criticized the common turn, the German Communist Party and Stalin, while also criticizing social Democrats and the liberals of the time. He rejected the accusation of social fascism made by the communists against the social Democrats, arguing that it fostered sectarian isolation, but he also opposed the quote-unquote popular front, which he saw as a form of class collaborationism, specifically with bourgeois liberals. Instead, Trotsky advocated for what we might call a middle path or what he called the United Front.

So can you clarify these arguments, help pinpoint Trotsky's position here, and articulate where you think he was correct and where he may have been mistaken? Yeah, I can go ahead and try to take a stab at this. So, I mean, first I think we need to talk, talk about this concept of social fascism that we've referenced several times and talk about, you know, the goal or the position of the common turn and the development of this concept. So again,

the social fascism has to be understood in the context of this declaration of the third period, where again, there really is just this belief in the coming revolution being right around the corner, being something that, you know, is really, we need to prepare for it by getting rid of the deviations towards reformism and towards collaboration with social democratic parties. And so social fascism becomes the kind of term that gets used to apply to this conceptualization of the social Democrats as the hindrance to the revolution and the social Democrats as in a sort of continuation with the fascists that are emerging as well at the time. I think, you know, there's complicated aspects to the social fascism theory. I think, you know, we discussed this

some prior to recording how much this is like an actual theoretical position and how much this is an ideological justification for how the common turn is positioning itself. But regardless, Trotsky is breaking with this position. Trotsky puts forth the idea of the United Front here. He talks specifically about how the United Front represents a tactical alliance between the revolutionary communist organizations and the broader working class parties and working class organizations. And I think it's important more wrestling with the United Front. Trotsky is not suggesting here that there is an actual long-term shared interest between the revolutionary communist parties and the more socialist and social democratic parties, but rather that there's

in the necessity of actual armed collaboration between them in response to the threat of fascism that is rearing its head at this time, right? And so again, really breaking with the idea that it is the social Democrats that are the primary barrier to the revolution occurring and that the social Democrats represent a direct continuation with the kind of emergent fascist forces. To wrestle with what Trotsky is correct about and not correct about here, I mean, I think to a certain degree, you know, history has vindicated the position that social fascism was not an adequate explanation of where, you know, fascist got, or where fascists got their power from. And I think everyone more or less has had to agree that the optimism leading into the declaration of the third period

about the imminence of the revolution obviously didn't play out. You can get into the why that happens, but it becomes clear that reaction was much stronger in position in a much stronger way than, you know, the common turn had predicted in this situation. The thing that I like struggle with in this is that I do think there's like something to some of the social fascist thesis that isn't just purely about like real politic justification for the common turn. I think you have to consider, for example, the relationship that the KPD had to the social Democrats in Germany and how central the social Democrats were in crushing the German revolution, right? So there's this historical momentum to that tension that I think has to be taken into account that I don't find Trotsky

wrestles with a ton here. But I think for the most part, like Trotsky is correct about the fact that the most pressing threat was largely misidentified. It is true that the social Democrats enabled the fascists in many, many, many ways, but it is also true that the fascist did not have this clear, like, one-to-one aligned interest with the social Democrats in the way that I think a crass application of the social fascism theory can kind of, you know, articulate. And so there's a certain correctness there, and I think it's hard to say that something like the United Front wouldn't have been a better response, right? It is clear that the fascists had their own paramilitary wings and their own armed bodies that they were able to use to take power and wield

against the left very effectively independent from existing state bodies. And so a united front that was armed and capable of fighting on those terms certainly would have gotten in the way of the path that things took. It's difficult with this text because obviously we're writing with the hindsight of history, knowing how everything resolved. And so I think the one thing I want to say is I want to be sympathetic to the other side in this period as well, because I think, again, given the history of the German Revolution, there is a very reasonable distrust and even disdain and hatred for the social Democrats in this situation. But I think overall, yeah, it's hard to disagree with Trotsky in retrospect about the necessity of a united front here.

Yeah. And before I handed over to Brendan, I just want to say like, yeah, that really, that answer really resonates with me. And again, listen to that German, the German Revolution episode, if you want to understand more, the tensions between Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Communist Party and, you know, the Freikor who killed Rosa were mobilized by the Social Democratic Party. And so there's huge tensions there that need to be understood historically if you're going to grapple with this concept of social fascism and how it was mobilized. But to kind of pair it and repeat and, you know, reiterate what you're saying, just so people are following along and making sure everybody's caught up the popular front in this context is workers movements working with liberals to you know

bourgeois liberals to fight fascism it's like as long as you're not a fascist we can all come together and what trotsky argued is that what that ends up doing is diluting the class part of the workers movement and and liberalizing it weakening it in the process and that therefore that's a form of class collaborationism that weakens the workers movement what he meant by a united front is all workers movements, whether that's the Social Democratic Party, which still had obviously an organized labor, huge component to it, trade unions in and of themselves, the Communist Party. So what he's doing is he's shrinking the amount of allies you can have in the fight against fascism from class collaborationism, right? Liberals and bourgeois elements of liberalism are

out of this alliance, but broadening it beyond the common term German Communist Party's position of social fascism, which even excluded the social democrats so that's what i mean by a middle path here is that trotsky is broadening it from that perspective but also saying that hey we also can't broaden it so much that we include elements that are actively hostile to our class power um so that's just important for people to understand it to keep up but brend i i think i would i would disagree with that to a slight extent brad i think that it's it's not about uh who you collaborate with so much as as how so i think what What Trotsky wants is for the working class organizations and parties to, like, retain their independence.

And this makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. I think there's, like, a lot of history behind the sort of social fascism, a popular front, united front thing that goes just beyond ideology and real politics. To the point that Trotsky, you know, like, what he's good at is, is, is, is, is, is, is, war union organizing leading revolutions and kind of

guessing what's going to happen even when he's actually misidentifying some of the reasons why what he's really bad at is inner party politics and you know to be honest

sometimes his dialectics and economics are a little shaky like again but you know he thinks that the Bolsheviks and before he was you know when he was

is like an inter-districtor, you know, he doesn't see any reason why, like, let's say, leading up to the October Revolution, people who virtually totally disagree, the inter-districtors, the Bolsheviks, and, you know, basically Martov's wing of the Mensheviks. They all basically agree on almost every single core principle. He doesn't want them all to join into one party necessarily. He thinks that there's an organ, the Soviet, right where where the correct party you know and this this is when you know why he and lennon finally dovetailed is because this is when like a vanguard gets to do what it does right

which is have the correct line fight for that line advocate for that line he's saying that the communist parties need to to advocate communism and and they should not merge together in groups but i don't think trotsky would have a problem working with liberals let's say for example like his issue with how the kind of Trotskyists were handling things in Spain wasn't that they were working with the pro-com intern parties. It wasn't that they were working with liberals, right? And when the kind of democratic and revolutionary forces were doing really well in Spain, they were working with liberals, right?

It went wrong when the liberals and the com intern decided that the anarchists and the Trotskyists and the Buchanists and the Radicists were a bigger threat than Franco. And that's, I mean, I think history kind of plays that out. So the unification of basically all of the non-Stalin elements of Marxist-Leninist parties, which were all into separate parties, into the party of Marxist unity, causes Trotsky to break with the Trotskyists in Spain. He's like, no, no, no, you guys can't be in the same party as them. He doesn't have a problem with us working with liberals if a liberal is willing to, you know, oppose like, you know, let's say an anti-trans bill or tear down fascist propaganda. there's no reason why we can't work with liberals with that. What we need to not do is dilute our message, right, if that makes sense.

There we go. Yeah. So the correction here is I was saying that, you know, broadening an alliance to include them. You're saying you can include them in an alliance. But what's important, what's the crucial thing here is that the workers movement and the communist movement must maintain its independence and its own program. So that you could ally with another group like a liberal group on a certain issue, but that you don't combine organizations such that the organizational core is. diluted by liberalism. Right. And you don't take a position on an issue that you don't agree with. You know, I think like if we're, if we're going to look like at an example, I don't think that, you know, I think like, you know, China around this time, right? You know, the kind of a popular fun idea would be kind of what like the common turn recommended or like the same thing with like Palestine, right? Is like, you know, the social, the left wing of Zionism is is just as bad as the right wing of Zionism. And. right so don't engage with them uh or or the you know the trotskyists in china you know don't engage with them but follow you know the biggest group right which the commenting right and how did that that work out for the communist party in china terribly right if we're homogenizing ourselves and and tailing reactionary groups because they're bigger than us i see then then we get crushed and

I think history kind of plays that. And I think funnily enough, Trotsky kind of made that same mistake in the early 20s in Russia. I think, like, this is where something we can find a weakness in even democratic centralism. Because if you're agreeing with everybody in your little central community in public and they have an incorrect line, you know, your unity is not more important than having the correct. And that's, you know, to an extreme extent, it's, I don't think. we need to go as far as, like, Bordeca and be like, oh, well, like, let's always split. Let's always have the correct line, right? Like, there's place for, like, intergroup struggle. I think it's inevitable. But Democratic Centralism, in certain instances, could be taken to the point where you're consolidating an opinion that is actually an incorrect one and therefore weakening the movement where maybe taking a more rambunctuous approach against that line might actually be in the long-term interest of that movement, but might undermine in the short term the core tenets of Democratic Centralism. Right. This is part of Trotsky's problem is he followed Democratic Centralism really well in the beginning of when the party was kind of turning on him. And then by the time he stopped, it was like too late and he was already sidelined. And then he just looked like a jerk. Then he tripled down. Right. But Allison, what are your thoughts on any of that?

Yeah. I mean, I think I want to concretize the popular front discussion historically slightly to where, yeah, you know, I think I do tend to read the United Front. somewhat more restrictive than the popular front in terms of who is involved in it. But I think, you know, building on what you're saying, Brendan, I think the other feature that I really, you know, that you hit on that is correct, is this idea of independence. And I also think, like, ideological independence and militancy seem to be the other thing that really gets emphasized here. The United Front, as, like, Trotsky discusses it in this text and in some of the text that these draw from, really is a militant organization in the way that concretely, the part, not organization, but militant formation, in a way that the popular

front doesn't necessarily become when it plays out in history, right? So by the time the Seventh Congress adopts the Popular Front formally, and it ends up getting implemented in various places, it really kind of takes a particularly non-militant form. And I'm sorry to potentially make Communist Party USA members mad at me for the millionth time, but I think if we look at the history of the popular front in the United States, it becomes very clear, right, where the popular front ends up looking like a relationship between the Communist Party in an attempt to appeal to the New Deal Democrats and try to build actual coalition work there, which obviously doesn't really happen because the New Deal politicians are not interested in that. But the party also adopts

like a huge ideological shift with the development of Browderism, the emphasis on patriotism and continuity within American institutions, American history, and American ideology. And so I think, you know, again, in practice, if we look at it in the United States, at least, it really looked not just like giving up organizational independence, but also giving up ideological independence in these very concerning ways and giving up a militant relationship to the state and to the capitalist class in a lot of ways as well. So those are kind of the two other points that I just want to try to draw out there somewhat. And I would just add in an American context in the U.S. at the moment, thinking about, you know, the popular front and everything

said by Allison and Brendan totally taken on board as well. We can see that there's actual real tactical issues with trying to oppose the rise of even just right-wing populism, whether or not we want to shift into the rhetoric of, you know, calling it explicitly fascism, with particularly the bourgeois liberals in the Democratic Party who's just not only whose policies pave the way and re-entrench the ability for the reactionary right to rise, but whose solutions are just totally antithetical to actually solving the problem because actually solving the problem would mean in some way, shape, or form, to cut at the core logic of the bourgeois class as a whole,

which is their donor base and their leadership. So, I mean, there's obviously historical shifts there, and to complicate this even further, that's different than saying the liberal that you work with in your workplace, right, who is a votes Democrat and isn't convinced or even maybe engages with socialist or Marxist or communist theory that that person, because of their class position, might be somebody who could absolutely be worked with to oppose a local fascist movement or whatever it may be. So actually making delineations and distinctions amongst the liberals themselves,

those who actually are coming from a class position invested in bourgeois rule and those who might be ideologically liberal, but actually have a different class position, I think that distinction could be incredibly important for our contemporary situation that we find ourselves in. Can I maybe piggyback a little bit off of what we're all saying? I think, like, Trotsky's talking about, like, organizational avenues, right, for coordinated action, basically.

There's no reason why you can't, you know, work with a New Deal Democrat in terms of, I'm a laborer, you're a laborer, we should both be in a union. We want our union to be strong, right? Because because we're not compromising our values for being in that organization. But kind of trying to get as many people to join the Democratic Party as possible isn't a winning strategy for communism. Right. So I think that that's the real practical thing about, I mean, the whole point of fascism, what it is and how to fight it is really like how to identify how to fight it. It's not trying to figure out perfectly what

fascism is. And so if we're doing, like, treating this text and its proper spirit, what we need to do here, right, is create or find those organizational avenues where we can work with liberals. If you're a Marxist where you can work with anarchists or what have you, whether that's trade unions, whether that's, you know, tenants, rights organizations, whether it's self-defense groups, whether it's, you know, food banks, you know, things where you're doing something that you, as a communist or an anarchist or whatever, have you, if you want to like take this into account too even if you're a social democrat by all means like if you don't agree with and and you know my favorite people to work with honestly are Maoist because they're they're they're into this kind of organizing and and you know man I can argue with them about stuff all day but we both agree that this is a effective action and neither of us are compromising our our principles by being in that group and then we do the thing and then it works and when it works working class people say, wow, we like X thing and then you talk to them on a one-on-one basis and kind of get that mass line thing going, they end up finding out that you're a communist and, oh, it's not that

scary, you know, and I think that's a part of why it's not so scary for, you know, even like social Democrats and stuff, you know, like with, you know, 20 years in this country, like ago in the U.S., like even being a Democratic socialist would have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, and we kind of even see how the Democrats react anytime Bernie comes close to winning a presidential election you know they're real scared of it yeah yeah it's interesting um Allison anything or are you ready to move on I'm good to move on okay cool so Trotsky saw fascism as the last resort of the bourgeoisie when their rule could no longer be maintained through normal parliamentary means but today we see a neoliberal capitalist order that while decaying still functions without a full

overt fascist takeover. State repression is growing, but it hasn't taken the form of what might be considered a more open fascism, at least not yet. So how should we think about the relationship between neoliberal authoritarianism and classical fascism? Is the ruling class preparing to shift toward full-fledged fascism, or is today's far-right movement still more or less operating within traditional bourgeois governance? Oh, this is my turn, huh? So first off, I think that what you have to realize about fascism, and this is maybe what Trotsky, he kind of is getting at correctly sometimes and he's kind of missing sometimes. I think he can't quite break past the limitations of what, like, Marxist-Leninist theory is at this time. It still hasn't fully shaken off the economism of the Second International.

It still can be a little bit sagist, et cetera, et cetera. he's not really fully breaking with a calm intern and the idea that fascism is so closely identified with the big bourgeoisie and I think that even though he says like oh you know in Germany like they don't need to actually like take over in a push he doesn't go so far as as some other strategies of fascism

to say like oh you know like Mussolini's March on Rome was like it was a stage it was a show he didn't he didn't take power by a coup d'etat you know Hitler didn't take power with the beer hall push like that's not how it works they take power by integrating themselves into the system. So first off, if that's happening, then we're here, even if we're not all the way there yet. And I think it is.

And I think that's really important, something I really, like, cannot stress enough. They get into power legally while they're saving democracy, supposedly, while being anti-democratic. They come in legally and then they destroy the system from within itself. That's what they did classically. and that's what they really love to do as neo-fascists. And one of the first things they do, right, is they consolidate all power into the executive and they associate it with the leader and its cabinet.

And what we have with Project 2025, there was a political article that came out today with an interview with this guy. They're literally arguing that the legislature or the judiciary or whatever it is, whether you're parliamentary democracy or a republic or what I have you, has less authority than the executive. And that is literally what the government is doing now.

It's that's as fascist as it gets to me. It doesn't matter what the law is. It doesn't matter. Judges don't have the authority to restrict the executive. That's what they're arguing with Project 2025. A judge ruled that Trump can't deport all of these Venezuelan people and he deported them anyway. That's fascistic behavior. And he gets to do what he wants because he's the leader and he is identified with the will of the people.

He has a majority support behind him even though he doesn't. right his approval ratings are the lowest they've ever been like at least in a recent like four year period you know so I think I think we're here frankly and I don't think we're all the way there right or what have you and then there's a certain point where like I think it's we can really get into the nitty gradient what's the difference between like fascism and Naziism but yeah sure I think I think that we're here the neoliberal system is rational the need the fascist system is irrational right So what a neoliberal government would do and what they would replace, they would throw in a bunch of technocrats, right, who have the actual specialized expertise in their field in order to restore power to the already existing elites, right? Fascism seeks to replace it with a new set of elites. So they are destroying the bureaucracy deliberately, whereas a neoliberal would strengthen the bureaucracy. It's highly bureaucratic. It's a centaur state, right?

And so if you look at like Pinochet, which is what I would consider like a neoliberal counter-revolutionary dictator, what does he do? He flies a bunch of economists down from Chicago. If he wanted to make the state more efficient as Doge claims to do, he would be hiring people who actually know how to break down and crunch numbers, right? What they're doing right now with Doge is having a bunch of people with no expertise in the fields that they're doing. They're tech people who know how to write code. vote, right? So they're the opposite of the right people for the job because they don't know how to read stats. They have had to like change their figures like multiple times, which of course doesn't matter to their base. But because it's irrational, right? It's an irrational system. Nealiberalism is a rational system, right? This is the side of bourgeois, petite bourgeois ideology. That's like Calvin and Luther foaming at the base and saying like let's kill all the Jews, right? They're not the part of the bourgeois thing, which is the Enlightenment. let's get these experts in like we like science these guys hate science does that make sense yeah yeah yeah and really quickly before I handed over to Allison there's um the the dialectical integration of you're you're making a great point and the irrationality and the rationality split I think is a very interesting way in to understand the difference here in the bureaucratic and the dismantling of the bureaucracy but of course it can't be separated from the neoliberal momentum that has occurred over 40 years

of the weakening of the state as such the the applied libertarian which is a generalized distaste and a fomenting of fear and distrust in the state as such, which then creates the ideological and ultimately perhaps material path for right-wing authoritarianism. So there's this interesting dialectical connection between right-wing libertarianism and right-wing authoritarianism and the neoliberal momentum that allows for this final sort of push. And the favorability ratings don't actually matter if they can become successful, right? if they're successful over the next four years of what they're obviously trying to do and what Brennan just kind of outlaid, then it doesn't really matter what their favorability is

because they've now more or less entrenched minority rule. It reminds me, I believe it was Andrew Jackson, who did some executive order. I forget the details of it. Scotis overturned it and Andrew Jackson had this line where he was like, well, they made their ruling, now let them enforce it. And the idea is that the courts obviously don't have any way to enforce their ruling. And so the balance of powers breaks down if an executive is brash enough to just do the damn thing anyway, because what are the

assholes and robes going to come out and stop them? No. And then the last thing I want to make before I hand it over to Allison is just the point about fascism as a process, because the way we're talking about it, just by nature of wrestling with a text like this, is that we're trying to understand it as this acute

phase, like this official takeover. And we have to just gesture towards the fact of the america's always had a deep fascist strain and for minority and racialized communities indigenous and black communities in particular it's really genuinely fair to say that they've always lived under fascism and if we don't account for that aspect of it that fascism is a process that can inflect and become more acute or go underground to be more subterranean but still always at work i think that we lose the sort of dialectical understanding of it as process

but yeah everything you're saying is super interesting and alice and i'd love to hear your thoughts as well yeah this is such a interesting moment to be having this conversation because of the sending of those deportees to el salvador the venezuelan deportees because this actually felt like to me kind of a turning point in um solidifying my position that something somewhat exceptional is happening I think I have for quite some time been opposed to the idea of thinking of Trump as just straightforwardly fascist and his movement as straightforwardly fascism. And I think that's mostly about wanting to overcorrect for what I generally feel is the larger issue in leftist organizing in the U.S., which is a, you know, higher level of cooperation with liberalism and attempts to work through liberal institutions. And so I think that's why I've kind of pushed back on that. But the last month has been interesting and really kind of increased my sense that there

is some sort of break from liberalism per se occurring with the current Trump administration. I think similar to Brendan, for me, it comes down to the judges, right? And specifically to the orientation that they are taking towards the judiciary and also towards the legislature. There is very clearly, like you said, an attempt to solidify executive power. They are every day testing the limits of that executive power, trying to see how. how much further they can push it and whether or not the judiciary can do anything about it. And I think, like you said, Brett, what we're discovering now is the judiciary can't do shit, right?

What is the enforcement mechanism by which the judiciary actually enforces a injunction against the federal government? There actually isn't one. And so we have a political force willing to ignore it. At this exact moment, even with the deportation situation, the Trump administration is trying to pretend like they haven't created an actual rupture. Their argument is that the planes couldn't be turned around in line with the injunction from the federal judge because they were over international water, so it didn't apply. So there's still an appeal to like the technicalities of liberalism here.

But I think that is obviously disingenuous appeal and we should be able to see that. And there is this desire to push back against any oversight for executive action. In particular, one of the things that I have found concerning is congressional Republicans' emphasis on the need to recall judges who are opposed to Trump or who make rulings against Trump. This very much clearly shows this desire to completely unleash the executive with absolutely no checks whatsoever. So, you know, the last month has made me much more sympathetic to the idea that there is a break that is happening here. I agree with Brendan completely about the question of Doge as well, right? I've seen people want to read Doge as a neoliberal move, but I do think

it's not, right? They're not replacing anything that they're eliminating with privatization, right? That move actually isn't being made at all. It's sort of just burning up this infrastructure rather than shifting it towards a market-based privatized approach, which makes it feel fairly different than neoliberalism in that regard and more about gutting civil society institutions that have existed outside the state within the American liberal status quo. So that also strikes me as a break. The other thing that makes me think that are moving towards something that would be worthy of calling fascism is that I think this time around the Trump administration does have broader support from big capital than it did the first

time around. I actually think originally a lot of the big capitalists in the United States were quite skeptical of Trump. You saw business and tech and finance positioning themselves somewhat oppositional to him. But there's been a big shift here, especially in tech, right? Which tech and the finance sector associated with it have really fallen completely behind the and in line would Trump at this kickpoint, which I think indicates shifts within the big bourgeoisie themselves that make me a little concerned. So yeah, I'm increasingly sympathetic towards considering this fascism, or at least the beginnings and emergence of a distinct break from liberalism that we might call fascism. The only thing that feels very different

between this and fascism as it emerged in the 20th century is that I don't feel like the mobilized militant mass base of fascism. is so present in this situation. There's nothing like the black shirts and the brown shirts that exist with that level coordination. But it also strikes me that the necessity of the black shirts and the brown shirts and the development of fascism was mostly to engage in terrorism against communist movements, which were sizable and acted as a potential opposition to the fascist parties. And here in the U.S., that kind of doesn't exist, right? So it is possible that the lack of an obvious paramilitary and, uh, you know, emergence as, you know, emergence as

part of the fascist phenomena simply doesn't have to occur here because a militant left that could actually compete, which those forces could engage in terrorism against also kind of barely exists. Yeah, just kind of some thoughts there. That's really quick. That's super interesting about the mass movement point. And there's this fascinating difference between the first and second term. It's almost ironic that things are on their head. Like in the first term when Trump took over, and I think this speaks to your hesitation and my hesitation over the last several years to call it fascism because his first term was so banal. It was so Republican. It was tax cuts and deregulation. And he obviously didn't have the ability

to maneuver the executive power in any way that would do the things that he's doing now. And in that first term, Big Capital was much more skeptical of Trump, right? They were much more aligned, or at least large aspects, or much more aligned with the Democratic Party. Trump came in, kind of like helped them out a lot just by being a normal republican got a lot more of them on board for the second term but now as he's as he's doing more stuff including imposing tariffs more more sections of the the big corporate bourgeoisie are actually now starting to get a little bit more nervous about it because obviously in these various economic policies can hurt them whereas a very specific type of big bourgeoisie namely the tech oligarchs

they're rising up at this moment because there's this AI race they know that the state is going to funnel and Trump's already guaranteed hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into this advancement. And they know that if they can get on Trump's good side, they can get in on the getting while the getting's good in these next four years as AI in their world at least is set to take off and really entrench itself as essential. They feel like they can they can use this four years as their way to totally monopolize that sector, which they see as being utterly crucial going forward. So there's an element there. And then the other

irony of the first for second term is in the first term of Trump, you did kind of have the mass movements. You had the proud boys. You had the streets, the street fights and the clashes. So as he was governing in a more classically Republican way, the mass movement and the street fightings

were present as he comes in and governs in a much more robust executive dominant. Some could even say a more explicitly fascist way, the mass movements and the street fightings aren't there. And maybe that's a lag issue right maybe there is there is a the sort of cultural vibe shift and we've already been through trump once which demobilized people and and maybe maybe that will catch up right maybe as things continue on and importantly as crises hit the trump administration so far

he's been able to operate in a way that there's really big no there's no big huge crises yet um isolated crises for sure but you know a huge recession or depression or depression a big direct war breaks out. You could imagine many different catastrophes or crises that the Trump administration, by virtue of being the Trump administration and being sort of anti-burecratic and having gutted the government and the agencies

that might deal with the problem. I mean, even a second pandemic, who knows, that that could then bring in the heighten the contradictions to such an extent that all these things burst back onto the scene. But there is a very interesting inversion between the second and first terms of what you'd expect. And the second term was actually more present in the first and what you expect in the first term has actually been more present in the

second based on how Trump actually ruled in the first term. So I think there's something very fascinating and interesting there. I think this is the playbook though of specifically Nazism. There's a certain type of like standard like liberal or conservative scholar of fascism, you know, and some of these people to the extent that they're willing to lump everything together, right? They've got their totalitarian theory and there's no big difference between Naziism and like Stalinism, for example. But they're also willing to split and say, well, there are differences and also Italian fascism and national socialism are different. And I am sympathetic to that view for a lot of reasons. In this regard, the American movement is not as

similar to Italian fascism as it is national socialism. Ironically, you think it's more similar to national socialism. And ironically, of course, if I take that view, the Italian fascism is more socialist than national socialism. But in both cases, right, there's a mass movement that predates business coming over, right? And so it's not that that mass movement didn't happen. It did, right? It was kind of the Tea Party. it's those Trump rallies they're huge right but also you know Charlottesville but the thing is like with the atomization right how everybody's politics are atomized now and we love to be all our online they don't need these paramilitary groups to do reactionary terror Dylan Roof is just as good as a black shirt like you know and decentralized acts of individual terror right because they're I mean Columbine these people were deliberately targeting people of color when they were shooting and they were on neo-Nazi websites, Timothy McFay, right, pull shooting, all these people, right?

Their right-wing reactionaries committing violence, and kids are scared, you know, like, Gen Z is terrified of gun violence for not, for no reason. And it is reactionary and it's deliberate. But the other side of it, I think that's important to note is that the neo-fascist specifically were quite comfortable with splitting into different types of groups. And I think maybe Brett, you might remember me talking about this a couple years back. So they don't need the proud boys to be affiliated with the Republican Party, right? They don't need the Aryan Brotherhood to be affiliated with the proud boys, right? They don't need, you know, you've got your hardcore, you know, we hate the Jews type. We have your hardcore Christian nationalist, you know, I've called them Neo-Confederates before,

but I think they've gotten more fascist over time, you know, those people, like the white supremacy people of whatever type of white supremacy they have, you know, you've got people of color who like this fascist movement because they're anti-trans, you know what I mean? Like they're comfortable with the diversity of why people get in there, you know, what I mean? They're comfortable with some of their people talking to the Zionists because that's a nation state, you know, kind of strong state of one people and all the Jews can go over there. But they're also comfortable talking to anti-Zionists because, and you see in the use of terms people we like, people we agree with, people I agree with. I've seen them use the term Zio, which was invented by the KKK. I've seen them use the term Zionist occupied government, which was I'm pretty sure invented by David Duke. You know, these are right-wing terms that are being used by communists, you know, and that doesn't terrify you. That's been terrifying me for a long time. That is the reactionary terror. It doesn't have to be the brown shirt or it's on the streets but also we're not seeing the coverage of it because just the other day I was reading that this this majority black town had a bunch of neo-Nazi show up there I saw that too you know so they're they're around too but the thing is that they already did their job we're at the part where fascism is taking over and the big bourgeoisie is attracted to them now right and that's that that banon musk split that you're seeing you know and that's also kind of like a contradiction between you know banon is consciously a fascist right and I think musk likes his dark dog wishle but he's kind of like he's a follower along in a lot of ways. He's like more of like he kind of has this like vague like accelerationist idea, but really he just just like a, you know, he's he's got that sort of like unhealthy childhood obsession with being a strong man thing that I was talking about that makes

you kind of psychologically a fascist. He doesn't have to actually like care about Nazism to do that. Does that make sense? I'm sorry. But I think it's here. I think it's here. I think it just looks different. That's interesting. That's interesting. Your point about it further being along the process where mass movements or mass acts of violence are necessary, but also the uniquely American culture of decentralization and atomization create what would in a much more centralized previous iteration, like in Italy or Germany 100 years ago, in a modern hyper techno-American atomized post-Ragan landscape, it's these atomized, disconnected, decentralized, either acts of literally lone wolf terrorism or just contradictory, but,

totally autonomous groups that are acting sometimes on both sides of the coin but it doesn't really matter because they're all sort of facilitating the process that now is actually so far along that it doesn't need to be enforced with street violence

as much as it might have in the very beginning when that shift, that 2016 shift towards Trump it felt different like it felt like we were leaving something behind and entering a new phase. Second go round with Trump it doesn't feel new because we've been through it and then add all of that to Allison's point about, you know, the mass movements of past fascist iterations needing that street violence because there were organized militant communist and labor groups that were willing to meet them in the street. And that posed a real threat to their rights to power that needed to be met at the street level as well as at higher levels of governance.

Yeah. And I think that is like a really important take. And I think I think you're 100% right about that, Allison. And I think like you kind of look at like cable street. which was they kind of did a united front thing, right, where you've got like these Irish groups, you've got these trade unions, you've got these Jewish groups, you've got liberals, you've got communists, all agreeing like, hey, we're going to stop this fascist march through this Jewish part of Britain, hit him hard and won, right? Same thing when fascism didn't really take hold in Ireland the same way because there was kind of like a sort of fascisty wing of the IRA. And then there was the communist wing of the IRA and the communist wing showed up and beat the crap out of them. and they were confused, and then they both went to Spain and fought each other in Spain. And, you know, that's why, you know, the brown, like the fashy and Italy were so important is because, you know, like, Italy was so close in the 20s, you know, they were so, they were almost there. And so you really had to get rid of these workers councils and things like that. And a way that even, like, they didn't even need to do so in Germany, it was more about scaring Jewish people, right?

Allison? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that makes sense. It's a horrific thought that you put forward. Brendan, that like, no, we are actually at the later step in the development of fascism in the U.S. where, you know, the necessity of that has somewhat fallen away and where, you know, the buy-in of the big boudoirie is occurring. That is a horrific thought to wrestle with. But I think I appreciate your point about the shift to like lone wolf tactics and how that still functions. And I think that probably does a better job of dealing with American fascism

less like mechanistically and more on its own terms, right? Because the American fascist movement has self-consciously begun to lean towards that approach to terror. I mean, the concept of leaderless resistance, which begins to emerge within American Nazism in the 90s, seems to have become basically full-fledged the approach that they're laying into. So, yeah, those differences there might be because, yeah, we shouldn't be treating it as mechanistically. Fascism has had an ideological development in the U.S. as well.

And it has, you know, has definitely been in that direction. Yeah. Super, super interesting stuff. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. this next question is pretty related to what we were just talking about, but maybe we can get more into the strategies that we might be able to employ, given the analysis already set out on the table. So Trotsky's analysis was developed in a period where social democracy, militant labor

unions, and organized communist parties had strength and mass bases of support. Here in the U.S., as we were just saying, we are in a far weaker position on all fronts facing two right-wing mainstream parties in a lot of way, the neoliberal rational and the irrational, more reactionary reform, a decimated and under-organized working class, and a Marxist movement that remains, unfortunately for now, largely on the fringes of mainstream political life. So what does this mean for us in the face of a rising reactionary movement and an increasingly desperate decaying capitalism? And importantly, what should we as workers and communists be doing today to build our movement's capacity to fight back? So many layers to this question that are all so huge

in their own regard. You know, so it's tough, right? Part of the thing that I, you know, I don't want to give into despair here, right? But reading this text from Trotsky and comparing it to our present moment, again, at least there was a sizable communist party in Germany,

which you could talk about as a force that could be mobilized. And so when Trotsky talks about the necessity of a revolutionary party that can rise to the moment when the bourgeoisie, or petty bourgeoisie over in a sense, prevent them from aligning themselves with this fascist movement,

which is not even fucking close here, right? And that is hard to even understand how we could apply to our present moment. So I don't have like this very good answer here, I think, about like how are we supposed to build the movement's capacity to fight back? Because in a sense, it feels like we're so far behind compared to what this moment might have looked like in the 20th century. I would hope that, you know, the conversation that we're having here can lead to some sense of urgency at the very least, right? If it really is this late in the development of

American fascism, then we really, really, really need to be able to pose a serious threat towards, you know, that fascist system that is emerging. I think for me, like, and this is a theme I've been finding in my life a lot lately, I think that it means that we need to have a politically independent socialist movement in the United States, right? Right now, the thing that is accompanying the complete, you know, takeover of the executive and the expansion of the executive is a total failure of the Democratic Party to act as a oppositional party, right? Today, we actually got all that polling that indicates that the Democratic Party's popularity is like at an all-time low. And that compared to a couple years ago, the position

of Democratic Party voters is frustration about cooperation with the Republicans. and specifically them citing frustration with the Democrats' willingness to go along with Trump's policies. So clearly even the base of the Liberal Party in the United States is upset about the situation, is upset about the way that there's a response to this crisis. And I think senses that there is no actual oppositional, independent political force and that the Democrats aren't going to turn into that, right? I think liberalism is having this moment of crisis internally within the Democratic Party, where again, even some of the more moderates like Nira Tandon are coming out and criticizing Chuck Schumer for his position about the government shut down. There is this moment of crisis within liberalism and the center left that maybe acts as an opportunity for us to push for political independence outside of the Democratic Party, which is what I would lean towards. But again, that feels like a hollow gesture given to a certain degree where we are at. I will say, I think this probably means that the more fighting style institutions of the working class are really necessary. I think unionization becomes really important

here as a way of resisting, a increasingly hostile to labor government. I think tenants organizing will continue to be very valuable for uniting people, building class consciousness among them, and showing how you can fight to, you know, fight for basic things like staying housed. These will probably become more central, but it will be very important that we figure out how to transcend mere economism in relation to these towards an actual revolutionary independent party. And that, I think, at this point, has to be the task that is on our mind. I don't have the solution for how we get there. But I think hopefully all of this can reorient us in that direction.

And that can kind of act as a bearing for us at the very least. Yeah. Brendan? This is maybe a little bit based off of, or definitely a lot based off of my personal experience in the kind of locality that I'm in. But I think that I look at how we initially responded to what happened last time Trump was in office and even got elected and especially – and tied honestly, and this is where I'll give some credit to the idea of engaging in some way with the Democrats. I think that like Bernie Sanders normalized socialism for a lot of people. I think that there is a benefit in engaging in kind of a Gramscian sense, and this is, I think, why I do have issues with sometimes the left's unwillingness to engage, and even maybe a United Front isn't quite always, I don't know, I think the United Front is still kind of the move, but we need kind of this sort of Gramscian, you know, almost Angela Davis-Belhoek's kind of thing, where we're kind of imagining, you know, a better world and learning how to create a

dialogue with people on the things that we agree with, right, in the same way that the Nazis can say, you know, oh, you know, you don't hate Jews. You can go talk to the Zionists. You do hate Jews. You can go talk to, you know, the, you know, classic, you know, Nazis or whatever, right? And then they divide it up, but they pull everyone, right? They shift that overton window. It's that Gramshane Wharf position. So we need to keep that in the back of our minds while retaining our independence. I think what you're saying about unionization and stuff like that. That is. easily step one right what we need is to have a toolbox with as many tools in it as possible you know if that makes sense and so we have to build all those tools one or one at a time one at a time one at a time because unfortunately i think that the party comes later and i'm slightly curious i don't really like endorse it but seeing kind of the uh rage kind of uh like whether it's you know the Tesla dealer stuff stuff or you know what's happened to exactly you know it's it is it

is it like that period in the 1800s against like when against racism people were just reacting but it was like the harbinger of something more you know I think that that you know Bernie selection you know Black Lives Matter round one

standing rock things like that it's Occupy we were learning things right and I think to be honest what Trotsky doesn't quite get What the common term definitely didn't get is that the working class was actually already in the retreat and it was that space, that void because liberalism can't do what it needs to do. Social democracy can't do what it needs to do and the communists can't do what they need to do or won't, right, is when fascism comes because they're a facilitating class that in most of history, according to a Marxist framework, especially a traditional one, usually either goes to the proletary or the bourgeoisie and now suddenly they're leading the charge because nobody. is doing anything, right? And, and that's why they poll so many people, whether it's from the working class or not. That's why the finance people come over to this new elite, right? Because

like, like, Clinton was their preferred candidate, right? But I don't think they preferred come all over Trump, really. Like, which is now they're like upset because of the tariffs, but like, dude, you got what you asked for. I'm sorry. I don't, you know. It's still getting huge tax cuss and deregulation no matter what. Right. But it's, but it's going to be bad for a lot of industries and it's bad for neoliberalism because they actually want relatively open borders because that's cheap labor. So now we're seeing these contradictions. This is why, like, you know, Newman, his book, Behemoth, like, he's drawing from Hobbs, you know, Hobbs' strong state is Leviathan, right? But behemoth is a weak state. It's an anarchistic system because the thing was always shifting under

Nazi Germany. And Nazi Germany had to fight war. to justify and continue its own existence because it was crumbling inside. Eventually, even a lot of the industrialists were starting to turn away from Hitler. And they were going to run out of oil and all this and that. So, like, now we really got to push into Russia quicker because we need oil. Otherwise, we're not going to be able to continue our wars with Britain, which we need because we started a war with, blah, blah, you know. And so, like, Trump is planning on potentially invading Panama. He's potentially talking about invading Greenland.

If Trump invades Greenland, I think like all bets are off. Well, he just did a huge, huge strikes in Yemen today. Right. And that's the business as usual side of it, right? Yes, yes. But, and really even an invasion of Panama is not necessarily different than business as usual. But I think that with how much space the U.S. has lost in the world, I don't think it would be treated as business as usual. So, like, we'll see what happens, right?

Is this a stable state? I don't know, you know. it could be that sort of chaotic you know system right we'll see you know like what happened with with Mussolini was that he was losing the war right with with Hitler he wasn't losing the war

it was an internal problem until he started losing the war I don't know we'll see like there's a lot of ifs ands are buts here but I think like yeah we got to start we were doing good and then I think we kind of lost a lot of ground because of COVID I think COVID did something psychologically to a lot of leftists I think that we were trying really hard to be responsible, and it made it really hard to organize.

I think that maybe we did a little bit of a popular front thing with George Floyd, and that bit us in the ass in a lot of ways. And, you know, I think that we lost a lot of the ground that we had been gaining since, you know, Occupy Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, around one. And so, like, that sucks. And I think that's part of why the fascism is doing good because the Democrats show. sure as hell aren't doing anything exactly like you said, Alison, you know. And, and we're in a situation. I think this is, this is maybe part of like the continuity thing that you were talking about too, right, with neoliberalism is we've got two parties, right? One of which is kind of a social democratic party and kind of a neoliberal party. The other one is kind of a neoliberal

party and kind of a fascist party. And so like, I don't think we're going to legislate our way to safety, right, especially if the only thing that matters is the executive. Like what happens when they cancel elections, you know, or, or, you know, they don't even want to, you know, they don't even want to gerrymander anymore. They're given, you know, they're going to take away in Nebraska the, the blue dot if they can through other means because the gerrymandering's not working, you know, whatever it is. But, but we need those, those organizations, tenants, organizations, unions, all of those things you were mentioning. And we need to, I don't know, get our feet back on the ground. And we need to get offline. Well, for sure. for real. I think you make a very interesting point about 2020 because it was a double whammy in the sense that there was a retreat

of all that momentum. The left had been building up, you know, from, you can go back to the WTO protest, and then through Occupy and then Standing Rock, and then we have, you know, all these movements, Black Lives Matter.

It reached this culmination in 2020, but that was bubbling since 2014 during the Obama administration, and that was, you know, mobilizing people. So, yeah, we had that fallback in organizing and you had the economic downward proletinarianizing pressure,

that we were talking about earlier, that creates economic crisis and that puts huge pressure on the system as well. And a lot of reaction came out of the government and particularly the rational neoliberal government's attempt to deal with the COVID fallout. And it's the contradictions that arose there that you spent 40 years dismantling a state, but now in this moment you really needed to step in and that rational bureaucratic side trying to do so and just having all those contradictions sort of explode. So I think that's interesting. Your point about the Bernie Sanders campaign, absolutely inseparable from that broader process of education and mobilization on the left. But, and maybe this is just a confusion on my part. You're talking about the war of position,

Gramscian War of Position, and this, you said there's this social democratic streak within the Democratic Party. But my position on that is that that social democratic streak has really been beaten out of that party when it tried to assert it. itself with Bernie and even though Bernie is still a member in some respect of the party and honestly in my opinion to this day is attempting to sheep herd people back into the party. It is actively hostile and even after it loses to Trump a second time, the party apparatus as a whole is completely unwilling to seat any ground to the economic left and in fact interprets it as a need to move further to the center as if you can move further to the center. It's like infinitely

dense in the center and you're trying to move closer to the center. It's just an important. possibility you're actually moving to the right i think um so do you want to clarify that position you said working with democrats in a gromshian war of position sense um and i just want i just would love to hear what you are thinking on that front yeah i mean you know i i don't think that bernie thinks of himself as doing what you're doing and and that's probably happening to an extent if not a lot i don't disagree with that view i think in his head right and i think this is why he endorsed clinton he was kind of doing i mean he was doing the popular front thing right he's saw Trump as an existential threat. And so now is the time to lock in, right? In the same way that like, you know, Trotsky, he's usually this kind of big proponent of, you know, permanent revolution, all of this during like the time period of like the first three congresses, he really went lock and step with like Lenin and Zeneveh in pushing back against people like Bukkeren who are pushing for more of a permanent revolution kind of thing because he's concerned about the state that.

big picture right um and i think that's what he's trying to do um sure i think that also if you notice his rhetoric has shifted post election and so as aOCs and so as like walls um they're they're going i think at least harder than they haven't a bit and i don't think that's gonna you know mean that the democratic party's going to save us i don't right but but in terms of like that being a site where people who are frustrated with the democratic leadership having that having that Gromshian

peeling off of those elements yeah or that ideological conversation right let's like here's our terrain right and and it's being fought in the Democratic Party about economics and that I think we're winning I mean we definitely were before Biden won like the left loves to be in opposition

you know that's kind of where we're good who we're really good at criticizing and we're not so good at unifying part of that's because we're diverse right we value pluralism but also like again the authoritarian personality he talks about like while our main goal is studying why somebody would want to be fascist he's like but also it's harder to nail down the type of person who's resistant to fascism right there are even people who are actually hypothetically prone to fascism they have that fascistic like authoritarian personality on the f-set scale but they don't have a lot of prejudice because maybe you know, they are actually themselves part of ex-minority group and experienced it directly, right? And I've seen that like, I feel like organizing. Some leftists are not that different in how they think

like they think really one dimensionally. They are really pure and everybody is like wrong and they're a deviant and they love like a strong, powerful man. You know what I mean? Like we've seen that. But they're still for whatever reason on the right side of things. I think like there's that too, right? So like

but we're trying to catch as many people as we can and make as much space for as many people as we can makes it hard to say this is the specific thing. And more importantly, as we often, I think, find this is how to get there. And then you get to the point where like the difference organizationally between a Trotskyist and a Maoist isn't as big as either one of them would like to say. They're just arguing about ideological semantics half the time, not all the time by any means, right? But they agree on things like, you know, a united front and these like working class organizations and disliking the bureaucracy that you see develop in the USSR, you know.

Those are all points of agreement between those two, and like they will work together great in X, Y, or Z situation, and then in other times they will fight bitterly to the death, you know, and just I remember, I think I maybe even gave you this book. There's a book that was like a study of like Trotskyist and Maoist groups in France and the U.S. And there was like four pages that are just like mapping out the splits of these various parties. And it's really funny, even though it's a bit of a bummer, because, like, for those of us, once we get to this side, we've got such a, not a desire to be right for the sake of being better than other people, but like a desire to be right because, you know, for whatever reason, we're nerds or we really but care or both, you know, and it's like constantly you're refining, you know, like I'm wrong about stuff all the time, you know, and I'm trying to learn and be better, even though I have really strong opinions. Like, I've shifted my opinion on this conversation, like, since we had to reschedule. You know, right. Yeah, Alison, do you have any, I have something else to say on this front, but I would like to toss it over to you because you haven't spoken in a second.

Yeah, I mean, not too much more to add. I mean, I don't disagree about like this idea of a crisis that is happening in the Democrats and the room to win people within that. You know, I don't want to say that that is something that we should retreat from with my emphasis on independence. I think I remain more skeptical of Bernie, right? just on the basis of the fact that I think if Bernie were doing something more than sheepdogging, I would imagine this is about the moment he would choose to make a break with the party, right? And his rhetoric has hinted more towards a break recently, interestingly, but obviously that hasn't been backed by anything there.

So I think that that's where I approach things with more caution towards the Democrats, right? But I don't want to say, like, our position should be like, fuck liberals, their concerns are irrelevant, and we don't need to win them over, right? think that would be a mistake as well. I just am very, very cautious towards that party and very, I would say, pessimistic about the ability to overcome its institutional ability to crush dissent. So, you know, mostly I just want to clarify that. Yeah. I think Brendan would agree with that. Like, you're saying there's this energy that is right now located more or less in the Democratic Party that we can tap into, use and engage with, but that the Democratic Party itself as an apparatus of power is not

something that you're interested in using in any way? Yeah. I mean, you know, I think, like, absolutely, like, not interested in using in any way. I think it's really more about learning how to talk in a way where we're not... Needlessly alienating? Yeah, needlessly alienating, stepping away from that ideological conversation. You know, like... It's precisely that energy in the Democratic Party that is fed.

the fuck up with the Democratic Party, the left end of that frustration that is certainly looking for something else. But because U.S. politics gives them two options, they're kind of stuck. And if we can tap into that energy and not immediately alienate them as whatever two tied to the Democratic Party, maybe we can win them over from it. Because I do think in order for our movement to advance the Democratic Party, as it exists now, has to die. Because it is not a vehicle, it's not even a party. It's a donor class. And it's two arms of the, of the, of the, it's one of the two arms of the ruling class and more than that it has literally every step of the way created the very conditions that we're now trying to fight our way out of and so

that has to be separated and i don't think that it can actually be reformed it's so rotten to the court it's so embedded with this consultant in this donor class its leadership is so comfortable so wealthy so right wing in their outlook and so from a different time ideologically that it has to be confronted and dismantled and bernie had that chance i think in 2016 he had a little bit of that chance in in 2020. And I don't think he self-conceives as sheepdogging. People don't self-conceive in negative ways. I think he sees himself as staying relevant by not totally going against the Democratic Party, which allows him then to do these rallies and reach out to people. But Chris Hedges had this really fascinating insight about Bernie where he was talking to Bernie Sanders and asking

him, why did you not, after 2016, make an independent party or take that momentum and turn it against the Democratic Party himself and Bernie Sanders' reply was basically, I don't want to become the next Ralph Nader, meaning I don't want to be so isolated from the power centers that I can't have any effect at all like Ralph Nader ultimately was after his failed run. Fascism historically hasn't been able to stick around. Fascism is in some sense of flash in the pan. It doesn't have sustainability because of its voraciousness, because of its cruelty, because of its tendency to create so much conflict by virtue of it trying to express

itself and do what it does, that historically what has happened is it's either been defeated by the whole world teaming up and crushing it in some sense, or it's been restabilized into capitalism. And after World War II, which was an inter-imperialist war and the fascist Nazi attempt to try to take over Europe and

install a thousand-year Reich, after that fascist virulent movement was defeated, capitalism entered this post-war economic period which you know social democratic period a period of relative prosperity that that the material foundation of that post-war social democracy i don't think is present anymore so that adds an interesting element because if fascism isn't stable long term if it's if it's is this this sort of immune response that capitalism has in crisis or under threat and if crisis this time around isn't able to return and stabilize itself like it has in the past,

then that really leaves open this question of what happens, that this is actually a new iteration in this. This has happened historically, right? We're entering this cycle at a higher level, and capitalism seems, I think, structurally unable, especially with the ecological crisis, to re-entrench itself in the way it did after the post-World War II situation. And so that is going to create a lot of chaos,

and there's ways in which it could revert to a sort of barbarism, that we've seen in humanity's history, but there's also a lot of dialectical impetus for people to push forward and try to build something new. If capitalism is not able to come back and re-entrench itself, if fascism is expressing itself but can't last very long, then I think, you know, getting as organized as possible, but also watching as the crisis radicalizes people,

as the center has already fallen out, we've been in this long, multi-decade process of kind of slow collapse and crisis. um that that that that collapse will also offer in its wake a break from perhaps even capitalist realism and allow people the room to start thinking in new ways and so that dialectical as you crank up the dial on a miseration and crises and collapse you also crank up the dial on consciousness and resistance and trying to find a new way i think that's interesting and and the luigi outburst and these other things that we have seen um this this more militant left that we've seen sort of assert itself over the last five to ten years in particular

really since 2016. I think that is a harbinger of things to come. And I think that what that is a harbinger of is a lot of energy here. And that energy needs to be organized. It needs to have its consciousness raised by organization. And that energy needs to be tapped into. The Democratic Party has been brilliant at co-opting that energy, at taking that energy and convincing enough people that funneling that energy back into beating Trump is the logical conclusion of that energy. But now that ability to co-opt is breaking down itself. So as things look darker and darker, the dilettician in me also sees a dark night, but the possibility of a new dawn as well. But, you know, will we have to go through a period of immense crisis and hardship

and suffering? Unfortunately, at this point, I think that some version of that is almost inevitable. half not very cheery but I think in the long medium to long term it's short term not so cheery sure you're finding some silver lining I'm trying to yeah I mean that's the climate change of it all too you know like like fascism aside I think that like if we're being honest with ourselves with climate change like there's going to be a need there's going to be some pain and some adaptation totally absolutely yes absolutely all right well let's go ahead and wrap up here I know Allison has to get out of here so are there any last thoughts you'd like to advance? Any final thoughts on the text itself? Why it's important? Any important

takeaways that you would like to end the discussion on? And Allison, you can start. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the text itself and why it's important. I think this is a interesting text to try to interact with. I think if readers who've listened to this go and pick it up, they'll find that they're seeing a text that's intervening into these complex historical debates and will need to look up some additional contexts, which we've hopefully provided here. But I think it's worth engaging with anyway because I think, you know, it offers the beginning of a class analysis of fascism and tries to theorize how one would fight it, as the title alludes to based on that. And so I find it quite useful there and pragmatic in that case. I think a lot of people don't want to engage with this text on the basis of kind of

just like sectarianism divide. And I understand that impulse slightly, given where I've come from in the past, but I do think it is worth wrestling with what Trotsky is putting forth here. This is a text that's impacted the Trotskyist tradition to various degrees. So I think, you know, there's no basis on which you shouldn't try to wrestle with and engage with it on some level. So if nothing else for the people who are highly opposed to us doing this text, hopefully they get something out of it in that regard. But yeah, I mean, I think there's an interesting class analysis put forth here. I think Trotsky is more attentive to the role of the petty bourgeoisie than a lot of other Marxist theorists, and I think it's valuable in that way. And also, you know, we should be able to talk about the

failures of the common turn and the failures of the socialist movement in the 20th century without, you know, yeah, I think some level of self-criticism is just necessary there. So these engagements, I think, are valuable. And I hope will be received as such by our listeners. Absolutely. Yeah. And Brendan, do you have any last takeaways? Yeah. I mean, I think at the very least, this is practical. It's a practical little pamphlet and I think that he's really not taking an ideological line. He's got a lot of issues with the common term that he's not bringing up here. He's merely saying this is not an effective strategy. You need to take fascism seriously. It can take power in Germany. And it did.

And I think that if you, you know, have some ideological hang up against reading it because of the name associated, I think, you know, be a historical materialist and do a deep dive as to why you and have that opinion in the first place. Just to be honest with yourself, you know, I'm not a Trotskyist, but I've been called such for, you know, taking, pushing back on some serious historical inaccuracies that's kind of taken our movement apart. I think, like, this is not, you know, we're not struggling with the same things. There's no reason to, you know, fight for an institution that does not exist, a state that does not exist. If you like it, if you have sympathy for it, if you have nostalgia for it, that's fine.

that it had done a lot of things right, me too. I think Trotsky did a lot right. I think he did a lot wrong. I think that if he's saying that the United Front is a good strategy for fighting fascism, I think I tend to agree with him on that point. And I would take that seriously. And I think it is important what Allison said, what Trotsky said, about like maintaining that opinion. If you don't like Trotskyists because you disagree with permanent revolution, that doesn't mean you can't be in a attendance union with him or a United Front, where you're still your non-Trottskyist organization arguing your line, but working on those organizational avenues you agree on, I think it would be foolish and dangerous to ignore that at this point in time. Yeah, and I really appreciate you joining us today and doing this text with us because, as you said, you're not a Trotskyist, but you do have a certain sympathy that might not have been able to emerge if it were just Allison and I talking about this text, and I think that's important, and you're a comrade of mine, I've organized with you for years and years and

years. I know you know your shit. You understand theory. you understand organization and you're a really principled comrade and friend of mine. So I appreciate your voice. I appreciate your addition to this conversation. And yeah, we can disagree. We're fucking adults.

We can read things that are outside of our exact ideology. We can disagree with each other with love in our hearts. And we can figure this fucking thing out because if we're going to continuously split off into smaller and smaller groups, if we're going to be smug assholes to one another, we're going to be fucking crushed. And so having an open heart and an open mind talking about these things, being able to disagree without your ego getting into it I think those are crucial

and hopefully we displayed a little bit of that here tonight so thank you Brendan so much for joining us Allison as always thank you and I hope people found this useful we'll be back soon to talk with you more stay safe out there love and solidarity I got my mind

on the dirt and the dirt on my mind I got to raise mountain metal while I step out inside I got the house by the river but that's front dry It's later than I thought Had to check the time Pour one out for the hungry one

She was screaming in the road Where the light don't come When I showed up into cop running But that's just luck Here in the dark we see clear for once And I ain't tucked I roll the dice and hope I don't get stuck But catch one shot

Badge and don't ever get up No time for what's fair What's true is enough I got the heat of my mind I got the heat of my mind And my mind on the heat I got a concrete box with a chuck-and-see

I got the nights and don't flip below triple degrees ice-packed tripper trying to catch you sleep lie one up for the ones in hell fight too for the ones

who get to do the cell they all say they take the years and they'll never tell a lot of people learn to sing when they hit the cell and I don't And I ain't tough I stop

I stop rolling the dice But I'm not made up But catch what that case Sometimes that's enough To go down so long You don't get back up I got me on the I got my mind on the dirt

the dirt I got my mind on the dirt and I ain't tough and the river run dry and I ain't tough for gone out for the ghosts and I ain't tough and she was screaming

in the road and I ain't tough I roll the dice and I ain't tough to catch one sharp pitch and I ain't tough they'll say they'll take the years And I ain't tough

But catch one bad case And I ain't tough And I ain't tough And I ain't tough And I ain't tough And I ain't tough And I ain't tough And I ain't tough

And I ain't tough And I ain't tough I ain't tough.