For episode 157, Elia Ayoub sits with Bill Fletcher Jr to talk about why downplaying authoritarianism is so dangerous, whether with regards to the upcoming US elections or even in organising spaces. We spoke about the US, Lebanon, Syria, Zimbabwe and more.
Bill Fletcher Jr is a longtime USA-based labor and social justice activist who has worked for several unions and organizations. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.
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Episode Credits:
Host(s): Elia J. Ayoub
Producer(s): Elia J. Ayoub
Guest(s): Bill Fletcher Jr
Music: Rap and Revenge
Sound editor(s): Elia J. Ayoub
Episode designer(s): Elia J. Ayoub
Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple
Original TFTT design: Wenyi Geng
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
There’s a rift that’s developed, that I don’t think is bridgeable, between those on the left who are prepared to soft-pedal authoritarianism in the name of fighting imperialism, and those who say that the fight against imperialism needs to be joined to the fight against authoritarianism, and that that’s the direction for a twenty-first century left.
Elia J. Ayoub: Welcome everyone to another episode of The Fire These Times. Today we’ll be chatting with Bill Fletcher, Jr., about a topic that I think everyone will relate to in one way or another—if not directly, at least you will identify this as a common problem in a lot of our spaces, a lot of our circles. It’s something that I have struggled with for a number of years now.
The tentative title of this episode is “Taking Authoritarianism Seriously in Organizing Spaces.” We will likely focus on the US context, but not just. I certainly have other contexts in mind as well, and I hope that you’ll find this informative.
Let’s start with some basic intros, Bill. Introduce yourself to the good folks who are listening, and tell us a bit about yourself.
Bill Fletcher, Jr.: Thank you, Elia, for having me on the program. My name is Bill Fletcher; I live in the United States, right outside Washington, DC. I’m a longtime activist in the trade union movement, international solidarity, Black freedom movement. I’m a writer mainly of nonfiction, but I’ve recently published two novels—two political murder mysteries—and am working on a third.
I was active in the trade union movement out of college; I actually became radicalized when I was thirteen, out of reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, and have stayed a radical ever since.
EA: Amazing, I didn’t know you wrote novels. At the end sometimes I ask guests to recommend books; I’ll ask you to talk a bit about them if that’s okay.
A couple of days ago—we’re recording this on April 8, 2024, for the record—you and I had this chat, and organically decided to have this conversation recorded. We’ve been talking on and off, largely by email, and this is a conversation that I am very familiar with: the topic is a concern I’ve had for quite some time and I would venture to say a bunch of people who have found this project, including many of our guests, also identify with it. I’ve often found it’s the only thing we have in common, this grievance: namely, authoritarianism in organizing spaces and in otherwise leftwing spaces that are dedicated (at least in principle) to a vision of liberation, equality, and justice—and yet at times we see this blind spot which is pretty glaring, given that it runs in opposition to a lot of the vision that we supposedly hold otherwise.
Talk to us a bit about that. What has been your experience, whether recently or over the many years you’ve been organizing? Why do you think this is still a problem?
BF: My views on a number of things, which have over time probably brought me closer and closer to people with your politics, actually began in the early 1980s. My political trajectory was very much influenced first by the Black Panther Party in the United States (I was in their orbit, I wasn’t a member); then I entered into what came to be known as the Maoist movement by some people. Part of what intrigued me about Mao’s thinking was the critique of the experience of the Soviet Union, and the issue of class struggle during the period of Socialism. But in the eighties, I came to appreciate more that there was a crisis within socialism (multi-tendency), and part of that crisis related to the relationship of democracy to the economy, and whether or not you could actually a build a liberatory society when you have severe restrictions on people.
I looked at the Soviet experience much more soberly than I had in the past, and came to see some horrific things that had taken place, all in the name of emancipation. This shook me, and led me to ask some questions about what kind of society I was fighting for. And while I can appreciate many of the different contributions that have been made in different societies where they’ve undergone a socialist revolution (or in some cases various forms of anti-imperialist revolutions), this question of people power, the actual role specifically of the working class, the role of the oppressed in constructing the future society—this question really haunted me.
In the early 2000s, I began to conclude that there was a developing rift—a new rift—within the left, a rift that did not necessarily correspond to prior ideological orientations. In other words, it didn’t break down easily in terms of Trotskyist or anarchist or Maoist or Stalinist. It was a different kind of rift, that I think has contributed to a certain kind of blindness to certain kinds of authoritarianism. This rift, for me, became clear in the context of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. This was the early 2000s, and there was severe repression that the Mugabe regime introduced against the opposition, all in the name of allegedly fighting imperialism. And there were people who I knew, trade unionists in Zimbabwe, who were jailed and tortured. So it wasn’t an abstraction.
This really shook me, and what also shook me was having discussions with people in the United States about this who didn’t want to grapple with that. So there’s that side of the authoritarian equation, and then there’s this other side, the growth of rightwing authoritarianism, that many people on the left have denied for so long. What I began seeing was this bizarre convergence between rightwing authoritarianism and some forces on the left who are ambivalent about the growth of rightwing authoritarianism. It started to feel like the notorious red-brown alliance.
EA: The closest equivalent I have to this experience is with Syria. It’s something I’ve talked about on this podcast a number of times, as well as in my writings. In Syria under Hafez al-Assad and then under his son, a lot of the ire of the regime was focused on two main political oppositions (three if we also include the liberals): the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists. The repression of the Muslim Brotherhood is something that is known in the wider world. We know of it in Egypt most notably. Not that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a problematic movement; I don’t want listeners to misunderstand me here. But the other movement that has been violently crushed in Syria, that is very rarely talked about, is the communist movement.
That movement, especially in the eighties, was very dedicated to stuff like the Palestinian cause, and ending the occupation of Lebanon (which would become much more of a problem in the nineties and early 2000s)—the Syrian and the Israeli occupations. They both occupied at the same time; they co-occupied Lebanon. And communists in Syria were jailed, exiled, tortured, and murdered for decades. To the point that when I first learned of this other tendency which we’re calling authoritarian, the red-brown alliance, tankieism, all that stuff, I was—I don’t know if “shocked” is the term. More like confused. I wasn’t entirely certain if we were talking about the same thing.
The more I studied my own history—I’m from Lebanon and Palestine—this became more and more confusing. Because in my mind, my understanding of recent history and the trajectory of certain states, like the Syrian one and the Iranian one, and of militias that are not quite like states but are part of a state, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is that often they focus a lot of their anger and repression on leftwing alternatives, because they are appealing to the same audience. They were appealing to a broad mass against, for instance, the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, or in the case of Iran, against Western imperialism and the Shah, and so on.
They understood early on that if they didn’t crush the alternative, which was the communists and the leftists more broadly, then they would have competition down the line. So many of them would tolerate some alliance in the short term, but at some point they understood (this was the case in Lebanon, as I mentioned) that the communists and leftists (and even secular nationalists, who were nominally center-left) were as big of a threat, if not a bigger one, than the thing they were resisting, like the Israeli occupation, because they provided a concrete alternative while also doing the same thing they were doing. They were also resisting Israel militarily in Lebanon, for example, but were not doing so in the name of an Islamist ideal but in the name of a secular (Marxist, in many cases, or at least broadly communist) ideal.
They understood early on that they had to crush this, so they took part in assassinations. They assassinated a number of leftwing intellectuals who came from the exact same neighborhoods that they wanted to grow into. In many ways, we can call this “the Iranian playbook,” post-1979: namely, appeal to a populist—maybe even a leftwing populist—ideal, but don’t make it too much about the left. Don’t talk too much about class, don’t bring up all those inconvenient questions, because if you do, obviously you’ll have to talk about the high brass of the regime and the religious elites, which they don’t want.
When I understood this aspect of my regional history, the other tendency, which we are identifying as authoritarianism in the West (and to be clear, this is not just a Western problem; we have this in Lebanon as well, though it’s more dominant in the West), was both confusing and disheartening. It’s something I still struggle with today, although I’ve moved beyond the Why do they do this? question and am trying to do something about it.
The question of why this is the case, to have this historical lens, isn’t an easy one. I would certainly not claim to have the answer. But I’ve identified a number of tendencies in the past two decades or so, one of which is an internalization of the War on Terror. The “War on Terror,” for maybe younger listeners who don’t know, is specifically something that was taken to new levels after 9/11, just over twenty years ago now, by the Bush administration and the Blair administration, and then many other administrations and governments took on the mantle and adapted it to their own context. The Putin regime adapted it to Chechnya (although that started before 9/11); the Chinese regime adapted it to so-called “Xinjiang.” This is a narrative that became very convenient. Effectively, it’s Bush’s quote that If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.
Ironically, a lot of people on the left ended up adopting this, although turning it on its head. If you are with the West, you are with the terrorists. In Syria, we saw this play out pretty starkly. The people who took to the streets and who even took up arms against the Assad regime were not pro-West, but their priority was not the West. Their priority was the Assad regime, and later the Iranian and Hezbollah regimes and then of course the Russian regime. And then a lot of people in the Western left especially (and again, not just; much of the African left has a similar problem) think: Okay, their main enemy is not the West; therefore this cannot be a real cause, this cannot be a real struggle, because the only struggle that matters is “anti-imperialism” (and imperialism here is only defined as Western imperialism).
I approached this problem from two pathways that ultimately met in the middle, but at least in the early days it left me very perplexed as to why this is even a thing. Lebanon, Syria, and Israel-Palestine are obviously neighbors; it’s all a very small part of the map. And yet if we talk about the destruction of Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp, by the Assad regime, very few people on the left have anything to say about it, while they have no problem talking about (and rightly so) the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
That’s something I struggle with, because as far as I’m concerned, being on the left means treating all humans as nominally equal, and taking that very seriously.
BF: You and I are once again in agreement. I think the authoritarian question needs to be bifurcated, for the purposes of today’s discussion, into how to fight rightwing authoritarianism as one issue, and how to deal with pro-authoritarian currents within the left as another.
One of the things, Elia, about this discussion is that this issue is not new. If you look at the period from the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 up through the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the full-blown Japanese offensive—one of the things about Japanese imperialism was that it presented itself as anti-imperialist and anti-Western. This had a great appeal for anti-colonial movements (except for those that were led by communists); it had a great appeal in Asia. And interestingly, there was a current within Black America, in the United States, that was pro-Japanese and that looked at the Japanese as the answer to fighting Western imperialism and colonialism.
There’s the famous example of Mohan Singh in India, and the Indian National Army—Singh had been a major player in the Indian movement against Britain, and in World War Two made the decision to align himself with Japanese imperialism as a way of fighting the British.
So there’s this current, and in the post-Cold War world it opened again. Now, during the Cold War—let’s say from ’45 through ’91—there were those who would slavishly support the Soviet Union, regardless. Those tended to be pro-Soviet parties and people who were aligned with them. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s been a realignment, and people from various political tendencies have narrowly defined imperialism, as you were pointing out.
I was as surprised as you in terms of much of the left’s response to Syria—including some friends of mine who basically identified the Assad regime as anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian, and anti-jihadist, and the facts didn’t seem to make any difference. To paraphrase the Trump administration, they found alternative facts to justify their positions. And we’ve seen this, as I mentioned, in response to Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: this narrow conception of imperialism as becoming a matter only defining Western imperialism—and within that, to a great extent, only defining the United States.
I think this is very dangerous, and as I was saying earlier, it feels to me like there’s a rift that’s developed, that I don’t think is bridgeable, between those on the left who are prepared to soft-pedal authoritarianism in the name of fighting imperialism, and those who say that the fight against imperialism needs to be joined to the fight against authoritarianism, and that that’s the direction for a twenty-first century left.
EA: Definitely no disagreements there. What prompted our conversation the other day was a concern that you’ve had, and that I expressed I share as well, over the fact that it seems that a lot of folks (at least in my circles) who are Americans, who are broadly speaking on the left, either committed or who identify as progressives or whatever, downplaying or even welcoming in many ways the potential for a second Trump administration. Not because they think he is a good guy; they hate him. But because there is the sense that Biden is so bad that either it cannot get worse, or even if it does, “we” deserve it, or need to suffer for a few years.
That’s something I find deeply troubling, as someone who comes from a place, a country, a region that has suffered multiple wars and multiple waves of exile and forced emigration. But this is doubly concerning because we are talking about the US, and whatever happens in the US—especially at the level of presidential elections—will obviously affect the rest of the world very deeply. It worries me, because it doesn’t seem like this factors in with a lot of those who are adopting this position.
I don’t know how they will feel or whether they will change their minds come November. But the fact that this is already a common topic of conversation in a lot of circles that I know, including some that I’m in—and I’ve read things online and seen people talk this way online—concerns me very deeply. What are your thoughts on that?
BF: I’m just as concerned. I started to see this tendency emerge in 2016, in the election at that time, among segments of the left and progressives who were so thoroughly disgusted with pro-neoliberal centrist Democratic Party politicians that they became open to—I wouldn’t say open to Trumpism, exactly, but they became very suspicious of attacks on Trump that came from Democrats. The classic example of course being the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election: there were sections of left and progressive forces who adamantly denied that this had happened, or was a factor in the election, despite all of the available evidence that yes it had.
Now, what impact it had on the election, no one really knew. But did it happen? Absolutely. Not only were the Russians interfering, but the Israelis were interfering. But we started to see this idea that the threat from rightwing populism, which started to morph into fascism, was being overstated by political liberals and by elements of the left, and that the real danger remained from centrist Democrats and their neoliberalism.
This has been compounded by the Gaza war and by the ridiculous, outrageous position that’s been taken by the Biden administration in the context of the Gaza war. There are many people, and many honest people, who are so furious with the Biden administration that their attitude is: Let the administration hang.
I understand this. I’m as furious with the Biden administration as the next one. The problem is that we in the United States live in a very electorally undemocratic country that pushes a two-party arrangement at the national level and much of the local levels, making it very difficult for third or fourth parties to emerge. So the problem is that we are given the choice between two parties; we are not given multiple parties. We don’t have a parliamentary system. So the question is: are we prepared to accept the consequences of another Trump administration? And there are people, as you said, who say, Yes, we need to be willing to suffer a little bit so that the Democratic Party is punished.
There are interesting implications to this. One is that it looks at politics as mainly about influencing elites, rather than as a fight for power. The second thing is: who is “we” that is going to suffer? Is it everyone equally? No. The people who are really going to be suffering are the working classes, the poor; much of the middle strata will be suffering deeply. What is the form of that suffering? One thing I hear very few of these folks talk about are the actual plans of the Trump campaign.
Trump has been very clear, Elia, in his support of the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank, and its 2025 Plan—which includes calling on a new Trump administration to utilize the Insurrection Act of 1861 in order to crush protests against it. There is a call for a complete restructuring of the government. There is also another group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, that has been systematically pushing the idea of having a second constitutional convention (the first was in 1787)—every amendment to the US constitution has been done in the absence of a convention. They’re calling for a constitutional convention to change tax laws, to eliminate various rights that we have, and probably to codify restrictions on a woman’s right to control her body.
That’s what’s at stake in this election. You add onto that the segments on the far right that are armed—they have weapons, substantial arsenals of major weapons, and I’m not talking about shotguns and .45-caliber pistols. I’m talking about rocket-propelled grenade launchers, .50-caliber machine guns, silenced weapons, sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs; people that are very well-armed and are prepared to provoke what could be a civil war. That’s what’s at stake.
When you hear people, including very knowledgeable people, ignore this—frankly, I was run over the coals by this podcaster a few weeks back, and when I raised some of these questions she ridiculed me. She said, No, we need a fundamental change. Well, yeah! I’m a Marxist; I believe in fundamental change. Do we have a political movement that is prepared to do that now? No. Do we have a political party that is well-organized and prepared to take on the fascists? No. We don’t. So what are people talking about? It’s completely magical.
EA: It’s that magical thinking we found troubling. Just a couple weeks ago I had a similar conversation. I was in London, I was at this conference, and I was having a chat with someone who is Lebanese-American, and her partner is Iranian-American—I mention this to emphasize they are from a group of people that would be targeted by the policies of the Trump administration, even though they are American citizens. The way she phrased it is she wants Biden to “suffer.”
To be honest, I wasn’t in a mindset to argue—I was tired at the end of the day—but what I would have said if I wasn’t in that mental state is: Why is that the only thing that matters? What is the theory of change one has, if that’s what we think matters? And: Let’s say that happens—let’s say he does lose and he does suffer—then what? That’s the thing. Then we have—at the very least, if we’re optimistic—four years of the most rightwing government in modern history, with death squads, with Steve Bannon in the background, with all of these people who have made it very clear what vision they have for the US and the world.
It scares me for a number of reasons. Whether it’s two of the biggest threats that we’re currently facing as humans—namely the threat of nuclear war and the threat of global warming and all its myriad associated crises—the fact of the matter is we would have a regime at that point in the US, at the head of the most powerful nation on Earth, that is very cavalier about both of those problems, and in fact is very happy to accelerate and worsen at least one of them, with consequences that are so beyond the pale and so complex that no individual is able to comprehend the scale of it.
I’m unable to do so, to really sit down and fathom how bad it could be. The consequences are eternal, for lack of a better term. At the very least long-term, long beyond anything Biden himself or Trump himself can do. It’s stuff like that that concerns me. Again, it’s not that I’m saying Biden is amazing on global warming and is going to fix everything. No. But the thing that does exist with the Dems in power is a bunch of people around them, and that’s something where I can at the very least see a way in. With the Republicans, it’s dead in the water. There’s no way to even entertain that notion, because they are very clearly against the very basic principles of human rights that I uphold.
When we talk about magical thinking, one thing we are referring to (and feel free to elaborate on this if you want), is that there seems to be a confusion (if I want to have a generous take on it), a belief that if we feel like something should be the case, then we don’t actually have to do something about it. We just have to either feel it, or feel very strongly against its opposite, or—I don’t know how to describe this. There’s a very deep disconnect between what we say we want (as the left, progressives, emancipatory ideologies and visions for the world) and how to actually get there.
And if we don’t know how to get there, then we take a leap of faith—and there is a bit of a religious element in this (religious in a neutral sense), of believing that things can’t get worse and that if we just learn, if we just suffer for some time, “we” (whoever the “we” is here, and that’s always changing) will learn our lesson, will come to the light, or maybe we will all become revolutionaries overnight. Any scholar of religion will identify this as a form of millenarianism: All we have to do is wait for the return of the messiah, wait for the return of the mahdi, and then everything will be alright and the good people will go up to heaven and the bad people will go to hell.
It’s almost like there’s a bit of that going on here, maybe in a more secular format: All we need to do is suffer, and after a certain period of time (that’s never really defined) we will find our way, or we will wake up to how bad things are, finally the hypocrisy of the neoliberal order will be exposed. What’s left for me to say to all of that—because to my mind it’s not a rational worldview—is: Why do you think things can’t get worse?
What is this “rock bottom” we supposedly think we’ve almost reached? Why don’t we assume it’s actually deeper than that and we can still fall further below? I’ll add to that: there’s a joke I’ve used over the years—supposedly it’s a Soviet joke, although I’ve heard it said about other places: We thought we hit rock bottom, but then we heard a knock from below. That’s the principle I operate under. I have absolutely no reason, objectively, to assume that things will get bad only up until a certain point and after that, automatically, without us having to do anything about it, to actually act or organize to create a certain world, or to further a certain cause—without doing any of this, it will just happen; things will just get better. I don’t know of any example in history of this ever being the case.
BF: No, absolutely. It’s interesting hearing your story about the person saying that Biden needs to suffer. First of all, Biden will not suffer if he loses. Short of him being put in a concentration camp, he won’t suffer. But millions of other people will. Part of what’s at stake is that we’re dealing with discussions with individuals who are actually not engaged in or driven by a strategy to win. They are at best driven by a strategy to oppose—which is not really a strategy. When you see yourself as a perpetual opposition, and when you see yourself as not fighting to win (because maybe you don’t actually believe winning is possible, or maybe it is an apocalyptic, millenarian view that sees change as only happening as a result of something phenomenal), you get this nihilist approach towards reality and towards fighting.
It’s ridiculous. And the idea that things can’t get worse—my story is the the story of the man who jumped off the Empire State building in New York, and as he fell past the fortieth floor was overheard saying, So far so good. That’s true of so many movements in the US. We have been in a decline and facing active counterattack since the 1970s, at least the early 1980s with Reagan. The attacks have sometimes been very brutal; sometimes they’ve been beaten back a little bit. But the attacks continue, and we have been losing an immense amount—but not all at once. It’s not like there was a coup d’etat in 1981 and then everything changed immediately and radically. It happened over time, so it became harder for people to realize We’re in deep trouble.
And we’ve been getting into deeper trouble as time has gone on. So it becomes a way that people accommodate themselves to deteriorating circumstances—not always sure who to blame for it, but nevertheless accommodate themselves. That’s what we’re experiencing.
The other issue that is relevant is, as you said, this idea that things can’t get any worse. That was the view in Germany in 1932, and it was made explicit in both the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party, in the slogan After Hitler, Us. They believed—and, as I’ve recently discovered, even many of the elements of the non-fascist right wing in Germany believed—that within a matter of a couple of years, Hitler would discredit himself and would be ousted. But that assumed Hitler was going to play by the rules of the Weimar Republic—maybe shake things up a little bit but basically play by the rules. As it turned out, he didn’t.
People who are assuming Well, we’ll put up with four years of Trump again, he will discredit himself, the masses will rise up, and we’ll oust him are making the assumption that Trump and company are going to play by the rules. But what happens if and when the Insurrection Act is introduced? What happens if and when the top echelons of the government are eliminated, career appointments? What happens if there is a constitutional convention and a new constitution is introduced that makes us a theocracy? Where are we? And in fact, where will these people be who are saying that it makes no difference?
EA: One of the interesting aspects of this phenomenon, if I have it right, is that it takes for granted certain facts of today’s world that ironically are at least partly due to those very institutions that would be done away with if we have this convention you mention in the US. For example, very basic things like the right to vote—which we know with Democrats in power is not necessarily guaranteed to be upheld, but with the Republicans in power we know for a fact would be aggressively targeted in multiple states if not nationwide.
And again, for me, nothing that happens in the US stays in the US. That’s not just a “me” thing—this is factually proven; I would go so far as to say it’s self-evident, to be honest. The irony with this type of magical thinking is that there’s never a sense that “we” would really be under threat. There is still a sense that we would probably be “okay,” whatever that looks like (the details change from person to person).
But in film studies, which is one of the fields I work in, there is an interesting parallel to this conversation we’re having. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast a number of times. When you watch post-apocalyptic movies, most of the time, many humans—most humans, even—in those stories are gone or dead within the first ten minutes of the movie. If you think of I Am Legend, which is a famous one from the past ten years or so, you don’t see yourself as the crowd that’s killed in the first five minutes, you see yourself as the main character, as Will Smith in that movie, because that’s how stories go.
And when we watch films and series of a zombie apocalypse like The Walking Dead, we identify with the main characters, we follow their stories; whereas statistically, we are the people who are dead within the first five minutes—if not me personally, definitely a bunch of people I know, loved ones and friends. So there’s a bit of a parallel there in this magical thinking, which is this belief that ultimately, me, we, people I know, will be safe. They won’t come for us.
I hate to bring up that famous poem of First they came for, but there you go. The parallels are a bit haunting, I have to admit. It’s never the same, but again, there’s nothing out there that tells me that this time around it can’t be worse. There’s nothing out there that says so. For one, technology has changed dramatically. We’re now reading of the AI systems being used by the Israeli army in Gaza; that is horrific. And what is equally horrific, maybe more so in the long term, is that this technology can become cheaper and cheaper, which means at some point non-state actors as well will be able to use it.
I have these purely intellectual or theoretical scenarios in my head: can this be used against oppressive forces? Maybe. I don’t know. But it can also be used by the far right. It can be used by ISIS. It can be used by the Christian far right and the white nationalist far right in the US. This is just one small example; the point is that we have already entered a world that is no longer the same world as even 2016, let alone the world of 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. Things have already shifted so dramatically that we—this time specifically the anti-authoritarian left, people who view themselves as progressives, who view democracy as something under threat that should be defended and improved, because democracy is not static, humans are not static—we need to understand that the world we live in has already changed.
One of the ways of doing so, in my opinion, and I’ll end this point on that, is taking authoritarianism very, very seriously as one of the fundamental threats both within our spaces and outside our spaces. Outside of them especially—of course when we talk about authoritarianism it is overwhelmingly a rightwing phenomenon, and the way leftwing authoritarianism manifests itself when it takes the state format is usually different. Overwhelmingly it’s a thing of the right. But when it’s downplayed or even whitewashed in “our” spaces, it opens up the space for those forces. It makes their lives much, much easier. Honestly, it makes their lives so much easier that they don’t need to fight us that much anymore, because they have the power.
BF: I started years ago, partly inspired by the late Nicos Poulantzas’s final book State, Power, Socialism, where he was talking about the rise of authoritarian statism—it was a very interesting piece. In the early 2000s I started thinking about the neoliberal authoritarian state, and about how what we’ve been witnessing coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism has also been the rise of a certain kind of authoritarian state. I’m not talking about the rise of fascism, I’m talking about the rise of a certain kind of authoritarian state that has increasingly narrowed the parameters for legitimate struggle and legitimate discourse, whether in the media or in elections.
Over time, again, we’ve been accommodating ourselves to the slow rise of this authoritarianism. But then, neoliberalism entered into crisis, particularly after 2008, and with this came the emergence of more rightwing mass movements. There are always semi-fascist and fascist groups around, in different parts of the world, certainly not just in the Global North. But we started to see in the Global North (and there I’d include Russia) the rise of rightwing authoritarian mass movements that have been representing a major threat.
Part of what struck me with the rise of neoliberal authoritarianism is the notion that the capitalist classes, and particularly the transnational capitalist class, I believe, has been preparing a preemptive strike against popular movements and projected mass movements in response to the growing economic crises and environmental crises. In other words, this is not a response to an immediate threat, it’s a response to a projected threat. There’s this view that seems to be growing within the capitalist classes, sort of a genocidal view, that the crises—both economic and environmental—are not going to be able to be resolved democratically, and they will have to be resolved through massive displays of force, the increase in the strength of the repressive apparatus, the cutting off of entire populations, allowing them to starve or drown or roast.
Within that realm, it shouldn’t surprise us that we have these fascist and post-fascist movements that are emerging, that are redefining who the “legitimate” population is and who can be the victims of this genocidal behavior. So there’s that. Then there is what you were just describing, which is really chilling, about the kind of technology that is now being made available, and that could absolutely be used. When we think about drones, autonomous flying vehicles—they do not have to be restricted to the state; they can ultimately be utilized by non-state actors in order to carry out various sorts of assaults against political opponents.
All of this is at stake in the election. I say to people, when it comes to the election: Who would you rather fight against? Trump or Biden? It’s not that Biden is our savior, or that the Democrats are our savior. At all. It’s about both the actual existence of certain rights and under what administration and what regime we as progressives and leftists would be in a better position to win, as opposed to a much more vulnerable position.
EA: That’s how I approach questions around elections. It’s the elephant in the room now in any conversation in the US—but not just the US: there are the Indian elections, the ones in the EU, and a bunch that have already happened elsewhere. For me, I’m not voting for the individual—it’s more like I’m voting for which system I’ll have to struggle against. Which set of ideologies and policies will be implemented, that I’ll have to contend with?
To my mind—and again, I don’t know of any reason this wouldn’t be true—whether I’m a US citizen or not, the Democrats give me more room to maneuver; I’m able to do more things because I’ll be less on the defensive. It doesn’t mean I won’t be on the defensive! But I’ll be less so. There’s a big difference between having to deal with the current administration in the US and having to deal with its worst elements, times ten, plus a hundred different elements that they don’t currently have. Like death squads. Like the far right being completely out of control and in power, effectively.
That’s the main difference. The reason I’m saying this comes from the understanding that I have, which I think is accurate, which is factually based—I have yet to find any counterargument, and I am actually searching—that things can get worse. And if things can get worse, if we’re using the metaphor of not hitting rock bottom but going deeper and deeper, it might mean that we have even more to do in order to dig ourselves back up. We’ll need to spend even more resources, we’ll need to put more effort, organization, organizational power, more capital even, to even get to a level we would consider tolerable.
There’s no guarantee that would even be the case, because again, we would be on the defensive. We would be fighting more and more battles coming our way, including many that don’t even exist yet, because they will be created if Trump wins again—battles that don’t have to come into existence. To my mind, we have enough of them. We have enough things to be concerned with. We have enough problems on our hands. We need to really think through a lot of them, because we’re nowhere near resolving them, let alone creating and proposing alternative visions for the world.
Taking all of this for granted, and assuming all we need is a good kick in the butt—metaphorically speaking, we “just need to suffer” for a number of years—assumes that it will be four years and then it’s done, although Trump has said a billion times he will not respect anything or willingly go away after four years. This is the same person who did not even accept his first loss, so I don’t know why people would expect he would leave according to the constitution, if they don’t change it by then.
I don’t understand how we’re taking all of this for granted. Intellectually I know some of the reasons, and we’ve discussed them here, but it’s still very concerning.
BF: I go back to the issue about a strategy to win. If you do not imagine ever winning, then you’re left in the place of assuming that all we can do is influence elites. How do we influence elites? Well, you choose not to vote for somebody, because you basically believe that the political system itself will remain relatively stable, so you’ll have another chance in four years to influence the elites again. There’s no serious thinking about How do we win? How do we build up our forces? How do we build up our level of organization?
I had an interesting discussion with a friend a few weeks ago. They were taking the argument that it doesn’t matter who wins. I said, Have you ever heard of extra-judicial violence? And she said, Well, the cops come in all the time and kill people. And I said, You’re absolutely right. And when the cops do that, at least formally we have a right to protest. Sometimes we win, a lot of times we lose, but at least we have the right to protest the behavior of the police.
But when you’re dealing with death squads, there is no right to protest. If the death squads show up and blow you and your family away, it’s not like you can go to someone and say, I want to protest the killing of my family. It’s the nature of death squads. I tell you, bro: the person looked at me as if I’d just started speaking Aramaic. They had not a clue. It did not register with them that there are periods of what Poulantzas called the exceptional state, where the rules of constitutional democracy (as problematic as those rules are, and their implementation) don’t apply at all.
There was an interesting film years ago, Tea with Mussolini. I don’t know if you ever saw it. It takes place in the 1920s, after Mussolini had won, maybe early thirties. These women go to visit Italy from the United States and Britain (one of the women played by Cher, the singer and actress), and they are enamored with Mussolini and what he’s done. But one of the things that becomes more apparent in the film was the level of illegality, the level of subtle barbarism that existed, that hid right beneath the surface. It wasn’t always obvious, but the idea was that there was no respect for the law. The law was actually irrelevant; this becomes more apparent as the film goes on.
That’s what folks have to understand about the moment we may be entering, which will then mean, for those of us who survive, the necessity to change the entire way we think about politics and the organization of politics.
EA: Because you mentioned Mussolini: there’s a clip from the mid-thirties of him speaking, and at one point he actually says, Make America Great Again, which I found quite interesting.
There are so many threads we have started unpacking here that can be taken in different directions. But I would love for you to talk about the fiction books you’ve written. Part of this project, part of The Fire These Times, is taking our imaginations, including political imaginations, very seriously, as not just a purely abstract, escapist luxury, or just something to do for entertainment, but a muscle that we need to train in our political organizing.
Something I’m working on, including in my capacity as editor at Shado Mag, is going beyond realisms. I’m referencing Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, which is this notion that it’s unrealistic (as we’re often told) to talk about alternatives to capitalism, because capitalism is seen as “realistic.” The argument that Fisher and many others have made (rightly so in my opinion) is that that in and of itself is an ideology. Believing that the status quo can only be the status quo, can only be what it already is, is in and itself a form of belief, and not one based in facts. As with everything that is a social construct, capitalism has a beginning, and capitalism can and will have an end.
Thinking about the day after, so to speak, and thinking about how to get to that day after, is not just something that we think of in the nonfiction realm. I think the fiction realm has something to do with that as well. Not that all books have to be about that, of course. But my point is, that creative muscle is something that I’m very interested in.
On that note, do talk to us a bit about that aspect of your life, the fictional books that you’re writing, and also maybe if you want to share what your theory of change is, given everything we’ve talked about—how do we get change? How do we change things?
BF: Let me start there and then talk about the novels. The discussion we have been having today is of great importance not because of who you and I are, but because of the themes that we’re touching on. It really does come down to concrete assessment of concrete conditions and the development of strategies and organizations that can win, and that are determined to win. And by “winning,” I mean advancing the emancipatory project.
Part of what I believe is necessary is for those of us around the world who share these views to be in much greater contact, to strengthen and elaborate our theories about the current situation and where we need to go, to learn from our experiences in actually trying to advance campaigns and movements for change, and to counter the views of those who are quickly going down the black hole of red-brown alliances. That’s what I would argue; that’s what we could perhaps talk about in another discussion.
In terms of my novels—I’ve written two. One is called The Man Who Fell from the Sky. The second one is called The Man Who Changed Colors. I have wanted to write novels for a very long time. I grew up as a kid thinking about stories I would like to write. And when I became radicalized as a political activist I put that aside, because it felt frivolous, even though I continued to read fiction.
Back around 2008, I took a crack at writing a novel; a murder mystery. It was a political one. And I showed it to a literary agent, who ridiculed it, and said to me, Why don’t you go back to writing nonfiction? I had, at that time, two nonfiction books. She said, Call me then. Which is not the kind of advice any writer wants to get, and it’s not very helpful. Subsequent to that, I constructed in my mind a separate story that became The Man Who Fell from the Sky.
The Man Who Fell from the Sky is a book about race, justice, revenge—and it’s situated among Cape Verdean-Americans. Cape Verdeans were the first post-1492 African population to come to the United States not enslaved. They came as freemen from the Cape Verde archipelago, which is five hundred miles off the coast of the continent of Africa. They are an African people; mixed, in many cases. They came on fishing boats and whalers, and they ended up in southern New England. They came speaking Portuguese or creole, they were leaning Catholic, and they had never been slaves—and they encounter a population of African descent that was mainly Protestant, English-speaking, and most had come as slaves or indentured servants.
The relationship of these two populations led to interesting understandings about the notion of race and racism, so I decided to use the novel to explore that by focusing on the period of 1970-71, a period when the consciousness of Cape Verdean-Americans was changing. It was influenced both by the Cape Verdean struggle against Portugal as well as the Black freedom movement in the United States. There was a rising consciousness of Cape Verdeans as a Black population, which up until then many had denied and insisted on calling themselves Portuguese.
The second book, The Man Who Changed Colors, takes place in 1978-79, in a different political situation, again based among Cape Verdean-Americans. I wanted to use fiction as many good leftist fiction writers have done, whether Dashiell Hammett, Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Kim Stanley Robinson—I’m only talking about people in the United States, but they are all over the world. Paco Ignacio Taibo in Mexico is a good example. They are all on the left and have utilized fiction as a way of discussing politics.
In my case, there were people who said to me, Bill, if you want to write about Cape Verdeans, why don’t you write about Cape Verdeans? And I said: A very simple reason. No one would read it. I said, Look, let’s be real. I’m not an expert on Cape Verdeans. I grew up among Cape Verdeans but I’m not an expert. And there are better books on Cape Verdeans, nonfiction books—and there are a lot of people who would not read those nonfiction books, but they’d read a piece of fiction. They’d read a murder mystery.
My first book starts with the murder of a white American construction contractor who is shot by a high-powered rifle. A Cape Verdean journalist in Massachusetts goes to investigate it, and it takes him back to an incident in World War Two—but also issues about what was going on among Cape Verdeans at that time. The Man Who Changed Colors starts in a shipyard in Massachusetts, with the death of a Cape Verdean immigrant, a welder who falls to his death. The main character, same one from the first book, David Gomes, is brought in to write a story about the dangers of working in shipyards, only to discover that this death was not an accident. But it also raises questions about who the was victim and what happened.
I wanted to utilize fiction in order to get into these issues—and the issue of justice and revenge is something I’ve always been intrigued by. The border between these two areas—when does something move from a search for justice into a search for revenge? So I was playing with those, and I’m currently working on a third novel in the David Gomes series, and we’ll see how it goes. It takes place in the early 1980s, and it deals with a lot of what David and his wife are going through, but also begins with the murder of a Black church member of a very rightwing Black church—the kind of church that some people even to this day don’t believe exists. I’m talking about vehemently anti-communist, misogynist, homophobic, the whole nine yards.
EA: That’s amazing, Bill, I would love to check those out.
I would love to write fiction as well. I never have. I did very briefly when I was younger, in my teens. Right now I’m just someone who talks a lot about it and reads it and watches it, like the hype man for a bunch of especially futuristic genres like solarpunk, afro-futurism, and so on. It’s something I’m deeply passionate about, but haven’t quite found the mental space to do it myself. But I do want to.
I’ll just end on that note. I encourage you to continue doing that; I’ll do my best to check them out soon, and all that’s left for me to do is thank you for coming on. If you have any final thoughts, please go for it. Otherwise, we’ll leave it at that.
BF: This has been fabulous. I really want to encourage you to write fiction. It’s really amazing—when I was writing my first novel there were a small number people who were supportive of me doing it; there were other people who thought, Okay; and there were other people who were very uneasy about me writing fiction. They saw me as turning away from nonfiction, as engaging in something that was frivolous, irrelevant.
EA: Escaping, basically.
BF: Exactly. And what ended up happening is, after the first book came out some of those same people came up to me quietly and said, Bill, this is great. You know, I actually have a story I’d like to write too. And I’d say, Then let’s talk. I’ll say the same thing to you, bro.
EA: Amazing. Thank you for joining us today, Bill.
BF: Thank you very much.
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