Red Star: Organize and fight!

Four facts: the police killed over a thousand people in the United States last year, just as they did in 2016 and 2015;most terrorist attacks are carried out by the far-right; the FBI found that white supremacist groups have infiltrated many police departments; and neo-Nazis and fascists are building a violent movement with media and institutionalties to the Republican party, as well as a presence in Boston. This is a new alliance between the state and far-right that emboldens fascist terrorists. Some anecdotes in support of this: in Charlottesville, a black man beaten with pipes by neo-Confederates was arrested; in Boston, the police protected an unpermitted fascist demonstration in November; the FBI targeted Black Activists as terrorists in an echo of the COINTELPRO.

Just last week, a white-supremacist terrorist murdered seventeen people in Florida.

People have the right to defend their communities. Fascists are a mortal threat to black, Jewish, Latinx, Muslim, Asian, immigrant, queer, trans and disabled people. Instead of shouting and holding signs, the far-right uses riot shields, cars and guns to suppress their political opponents. They disdain democracy and hold segregation and a white ethno-state as rational outcomes. Resistance to armed fascism can only come through organized physical force. Charlottesville showed this when fascists were stopped from further atrocities by the intervention of anarchists and socialists.Fascists take historical precedents to their extreme end. We already have internment camps, torture of detainees, secret prisons, targeted assassination of dissidents, racial slavery and genocide as historical precedents in America. The alt-right wants to resurrect and intensify these horrors.

We are witnessing the construction of a movement to force the state to solve social problems through violence. Already, under Obama, armed right-wingers like the Bundy family suffered little punishment, while unarmed movements like Occupy and Standing Rock were besieged and destroyed. The authoritarian strain within capitalism is compatible with the racial aims of fascism. The far-right is a threat and should be dealt with as such.

Breaking their power requires a twofold strategy. The first element is organized confrontation. Here we can take lessons from the Panthers. We need to show a willingness to contest power and an ability to exercise discretion over the use of force. As part of the effort to strengthen solidarity and ready ourselves, we need to build institutions and groups that promote practical self-defense and organizing skills, including training in de-escalation, the use of legal weapons and rights under the law.

Liberalism is historically weak against fascism: They grow from the same philosophical soil and share the same obsessions with nation, ideals and property.

The second tool against the alt-right is a political program that destroys the material conditions that allow fascism to grow: imperialism, alienation and inequality. Resistance is doomed without a positive political program, like the one articulated by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Hollow appeals to values, screams about Russia and pitiful reforms will not solve the social crisis in the United States. But winning healthcare, workplace democracy, infrastructure, clean energy, universal education, peace and the destruction of the police-state will.