I saw a very recent tweet on Bluesky by Eli Valley, which goes: “This is the culmination of a longstanding demonization campaign against a Jewish professor—advanced almost a year ago by AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres, who shared a graphic produced by his friends at the fascist Canary Mission harassment group:” and then he links a picture. Here’s a link to the tweet. It’s not the link or the image I want to talk about, though, or even the situation. It’s the tweet itself.
It’s not like that. I’m pretty sure that I know what you’re thinking now and that’s not what I mean. I’ve got no issue with Valley’s sentiment or even his message. It’s more that it picks at something that I want to talk about.
“AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres”. “fascist Canary Mission harassment group”. That’s what I want to talk about.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with those characterizations, but it makes me think about when people say “This is why you can’t call everything you don’t like fascist” or something similar to that. As if the term can be cheapened, and that saying it too often is going to reduce its power.
I very strongly do not believe this. If something looks fascist, say it is fascist. There’s no point beating around the bush. I do think that people will sometimes use “fascist” or “nazi” more as an agitation than as a description, but I don’t think that’s a problem.
I’m writing this because I think it has to be stressed that noticing fascism is not enough. We can all notice it. We can all see it happening. The point, as they say, is to do something about it. And this is the hill that it’s proving very hard for us to climb.
I bring this up in relation to Valley not because I have any issue with what Valley does, but merely because seeing this tweet is what made me reflect on this situation. Because it is easy enough to call these things out, but it brings up the reason I have for my own project.
I think one reason that people disdain academia and “intellectual thought” is that they believe that it’s all a big exercise in noticing. They think that all academia is good for is describing things that are already there in ways that are just too complicated to be practically useful. This is a ridiculous overstatement, an example of self-flagellation.
I’m going to reference Eco here, but not “Ur-Fascism” (which is simply noticing, in my opinion); I’m going to borrow my example from A Theory of Semiotics. What people say is look, we know the water flows through the pipe, why do we need some high-falutin’ engineer here to tell us what to do? But the point of the engineer, the academic, is to say “this is how you can be more precise”, “this is how you can improve”, and why is that? It’s because they’ve studied the problem, and because their knowledge is not just from “practical experience” but comes from information about the situation itself, information which can only be gained not by performing some utility but by studying for its own sake.
I don’t write about fascism and about power and persuasion because I think that it looks good for me to think about these things. I write about them because understanding these mechanisms is the first part of understanding how and why to break them apart, especially in a complex situation such as we currently find ourselves. Revolution has never been easy, but never before has it been so inconvenient, so difficult to attain, so multivalent, so out of reach. In other situations it has been a matter of courage and need more than anything else. In the modern surveillance panopticon, we have to deal with the logistics of power and understanding in ways that were not necessary before.
Too often, I find that people think the problems are solved and the only thing waiting for us to do is to put them into practice. This is an illusion, perhaps a conscious delusion. The tactics that led to a successful revolution 100 years ago are obsolete by generations. When was the last time that a revolution succeeded in a country with up-to-date technologies, both mechanical and social? The technology of oppression is advancing rapidly, yet we are not even studying the technology of political resistance so that we can update it.
I don’t mean to denigrate people who have been working very hard on the ground, in protests and in organizing. But what we are doing so far is holding the line. We haven’t made any breakthroughs in decades. Part of this is because we have forgotten that there is more than noticing, that knowledge has the ability to help us understand our situation but only if we seek it out. We do not have the luxury of a war of attrition, because the more than we lose, the more that the other side gains. If we are going to create an equal world, we have to understand enough to be able to make a move.
We can’t believe that just because we can call people “fascists” that we have fully understood what they are about and how to stop them. Until we have solved the problem, we should realize that there is more for us to know, and that the more we do know, the better we can oppose them.
I’m not going to go through a full treatment here; that’s something I’m going to be working on (I’m taking a short break to do some political fiction). But I will point this out. People on the left think that the probem with fascism is that enough people just don’t want to fight against fascism, and therefore those people just need to make the choice to fight fascism and then it’ll be over.
Okay. Let’s say that you’re right. Why does your analysis stop there? Because to me, we then need to say, why are people not animated to fight it? And if you say, well they’re racist, we have to say, why are they racist? And that’s not a question that I could even think of a hypothetical next step for… and that’s kind of the issue. If you say “well they are Just Like That”, okay then, what is your political solution? Do you think that the thing you don’t want to say is something you could execute and have a livable country afterwards? And I’m not giving you an answer here. What I’m saying is these are the questions that need answers and that do not have answers.
What I produce may not be eminently readable. I wish I could produce thought that was immediately ready for application. But that is not how I work, and I don’t think it’s how the production of knowledge works. The first things I say about what I discover about fascism, power, cogency, social order, and so on, those things may be abstract, they may seem far from an applicable context. But it is all a process. I could say that I am speculating about this, but I’m not. The more I’ve written abstractly, the more confident I’ve been in commenting on current events when I do. It’s because I’ve thought about the issue thoroughly before. Trying to simply react to something “in the news” without having done productive thought about the issue always makes me either jump to conclusions or refuse to come to a conclusion, neither of which is very satisfying for anyone. And these ideas are not out there.
My message here is that the work being done in knowledge spaces can go beyond just noticing. It can be useful for the creation and refinement of action. When we have figured out exactly what to do about fascists and how it can be done, we won’t have to worry about people “diluting” the term fascist. The real fascists will be gotten rid of. We won’t have to feel self-conscious about this word seeming too exaggerated. We’ll have given it the weight it deserves, a weight heavy enough to crush those who actually want to carry the word around.