By Steve D’Arcy

[Note: this contains some plot spoilers.]

Those who avoided reading Karl Marx’s three-volume, 2,500 page magnum opus, Capital, in the improbable expectation that someday a movie version would come out, have finally got their wish. Boots Riley’s film, Sorry to Bother You, may indeed be the most marxist film ever made.

Riley’s remarkably ambitious film is, in fact, many things: a critique of the “sign-spinning” role of the ‘culture industry’ under capitalism, a challenge to the self-understanding and the self-importance of activist subcultures, an attempt to dramatize a way of thinking about working-class consciousness in a cultural setting where 70% of Americans think of themselves as “middle class,” a meditation on the complicated relation between dignity and both performance and the refusal to perform, and a self-critical exploration of the temptation of film to replicate uncritically the “scripts” or conventions of bourgeois ideology instead of exposing their deceptive and self-destructive character — and much more besides. But here I want to focus especially on one dimension of this complex, multidimensional cinematic achievement: the film’s attempt to restate the argument of Marx’s Capital.

Consider, in particular, the metaphor at the very centre of Marx’s book: the passage, across a threshold, from the surface domain of “circulation,” into a “hidden abode,” the behind-the-scenes domain of “production.” Marx puts it like this:

Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags [the capitalist] and by the possessor of labour-power [the worker], we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere [of circulation or buying and selling], where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all people, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. (Marx, Capital, I, ch. 6)

This hidden abode of production, Marx points out, is not about ‘consumers’ making ‘choices,’ or people seeking ‘opportunities’ to obtain ‘satisfaction’ by entering into ‘contractual arrangements’ — the jargon of capitalism’s flattering self-understanding. No, in this hidden abode, we move from the surface of choice and contract, to the deep structure of capitalism as a form of coercion, domination, and exploitation.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding. (Marx, Capital, I, ch. 6)

The remarkable “plot twist” in Sorry to Bother You follows Marx’s logic to a tee, even to the point of taking literally Marx’s formula, “a change in the physiognomy [i.e., facial configuration] of our dramatis personae.” Marx’s metaphor refers to the shift from the free and equal preference-motivated consumers making choices, to the dominated labourers pressed into the service of powerful exploiters. In Riley’s film, the “physiognomy,” the very bodily structure and physical features of the system’s work-horses, is transformed visibly, so that the characters or “dramatis personae” turn into horse-people, reduced to their capacity to carry the load of capitalist production.

It is worth recalling that Marx refers to child factory workers as “work-horses” in Capital, I (chapter 10, section 6). Later in the book, Marx cites an observer of South American mine workers who notes that their bosses “treat them like horses.” Riley is no doubt right to see this metaphor as an illuminating condensation of Marx’s critique of capitalism, combining as it does the idea of workers as victims of the system who are exploited for their productivity, but also as bearers of the power to ‘buck’ the system, and thereby to embody a special kind of nobility and even a super-human strength, as drivers of the process of their own liberation.

Like Marx’s Capital, Riley’s Sorry to Bother You places class and class struggle at the very centre of its worldview. In particular, it proposes a way of thinking about “class consciousness.” In this conception, most people are workers, yet they don’t identify with their status as workers, regarding working-class membership as a kind of danger or threat to their self-image and social aspirations. Membership in the working class is a reality that many workers want to conceal from themselves as well as from others. Famously, or infamously, in US culture to be identified as working-class is widely perceived as a kind of humiliation, which is why so many American workers consider themselves to be “middle class,” not working class.

In this film, those hoping to elude the threat of being revealed as a worker try to escape this fate by exploring various officially authorized avenues of escape: one can try to “get ahead” by seeking “success,” pursuing the promise of affluence; one can try to rebel in the performative mode (“Left Eye”), pursuing the promise of a unique anti-systemic efficacy; one can try to retreat into creativity and artistic performance, pursuing the promise of imaginary liberation from forms of domination that are all too real. All of these avenues are adopted by leading characters in the film. As Riley presents them, though, these are all evasions, motivated by the false promise that one can find dignity, protection from the perceived humiliation of being working-class, in scrupulous compliance with some script about how we’re supposed to live in order to be ‘special’ or to gain approval or recognition. Again and again, though, the characters crash into the reality that these performances of being special all end in the very humiliation that they are supposed to insulate them from.

Ultimately, the characters find that the only way to secure their dignity is to be honest — to stop performing — and accept the reality of their “dehumanization,” as a kind of opening toward a dialectical reversal. According to Marx, workers “have a world to win,” but the world can only be won if we first of all accept that we have “nothing to lose.” Marx tried to capture the dialectical character of this predicament, the working-class situation, in the idea of “radical chains”: a state of being “which has a universal character by its universal suffering” and which becomes fully human only because it starts from a “complete loss of humanity,” such that its liberation has to be a revolution which changes everything. (These quoted bits are from Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”) And so it is that in this film, only the most humiliated, dehumanized, but also the least fake characters — the equisapiens — actually live dignified lives. But they live out dignity, not quite because “all labour has dignity,” as Martin Luther King would say, but because the authenticity of their revolt, which is about power, not performance, enacts precisely the kind of freedom, solidarity, and autonomy that capitalism’s systems of exploitation and oppression try to deny them.

Arguably, anti-capitalist revolt has proven more difficult, and pro-capitalist ideology has proven more attractive to workers, than Marx’s Capital had led us to expect. The problem of ideological attachment to the system has for this reason been a central theme of Marxism for the past 100 years. This theme is also taken up by Riley’s film, as characters adopt strategies of resistance that seem only to confirm their stubborn attachment to or complicity with the system they are supposed to be opposing. The Left Eye ‘culture jamming’ group — a bit reminiscent of Banksy, perhaps — is depicted by Riley as sincere in motive, and to that extent admirable, but at the same time woefully incapable of having its intended effect of undermining capitalist hegemony. On the contrary, the film’s main villain, the prototypical Bay Area ‘disruptive entrepreneur’ Steve Lift, actually seeks out Left Eye protest images and displays them in his mansion, as edgy cultural collectibles. In a parallel failure, when the system’s work-horses deploy their power to defeat the police vehicles that had initially defeated the strike tactics introduced by Cassius Green, the clueless activists imagine that they themselves are responsible for act of the equisapiens, which the activists imagine to be a confirmation of their supposedly inspiring organizing work. Cash’s sometimes partner, Detroit, goes so far as to call Cash the “mastermind” behind a victory that he not only didn’t orchestrate, but didn’t even see coming.

But Riley does not really look down on these failed resistance methods, from a holier-than-thou posture. He says even to himself, as Marx puts it in Capital, “De te fabula narratur,” that is, “This story is also about you!” Indeed, Riley is at his most interesting and subtle when he exposes the work itself, his own film, to the very objection he levels at other forms of cultural politics. “Stick to the script,” the workers at the call centre in Sorry to Bother You are repeatedly told by their bosses. But this, after all, is itself a line in a script. And this is one of the many signals in Sorry to Bother You urging the viewer to be critical, not just of the film’s obvious targets — capitalism, liberalism, and the aspiration to be something “more than” a worker — but also of the form and medium of the critique itself. It is no accident that, when the film’s capitalist villain tries to discourage Cassius Greene (pronounced “cash is green”) from identifying with his fellow workers (“equisapiens”), he does so by showing him a film. Indeed, at the heart of Riley’s movie is a kind of pervasive self-deprecation of artistic form as such: art is fundamentally performance, and performance — Riley wants to argue — is always tempted to become a kind of fakery in which we ultimately demean ourselves by pretending to be something we’re not, or rather pretending not to be what we are: “use your white voice”; “I know you can rap,” “you can be a power caller,” and so on.

When we express ourselves in the mode of performance, “it sounds like a voice-over,” as one character says, drawing our attention (in a bluntly Brechtian mode), on the one hand, to the fact that as we watch the film we’re listening to voice-overs, and on the other hand, to the fact that the voice-overs aren’t just actual voice-overs, but they are voice-overs that sound like voice-overs, that is, performances of what-performances-are-supposed-to-be-like. The very difficulty of extricating ourselves from performance, to tell the simple truth about ourselves, even to ourselves, is underlined again and again. As Marx puts the point in Capital: “[I]n their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form.”

Of course, there is, crucially, a third film that we’re shown by Riley. In addition to the meta-film itself, Sorry to Bother You, and the capitalist self-justification film, there is also the equisapien backstory ‘exposé’ video, taken on a phone. In many ways, understanding the relationship between these three films — the work of art itself, the capitalist propaganda film, and the proletarian honest self-revelation (“I’m suffering!”) film, is the key to understanding Riley’s vision and his conception of the relation between art, truth, performance, dignity/humiliation and class. (The lifting of the garage door near the end is a kind of fourth film, albeit in the mode of — very literally — street theatre; and the overall plot consists mainly in a series of performances, punctuated by occasional refusals to perform, although some of these ostensible refusals to perform prove also to be stuck in the mode of performance, or sticking to the script, to which characters often find themselves to be — in a word that is ever-present in this film, like a haunting spectre — “glued.“)

The suffering of working-class people — on blunt display in the exposé  phone-video — is not merely a plot development affecting “dramatis personae,” fictional or fictionalized characters. On the contrary, the suffering that capitalism inflicts is all too real. In this sense, Riley’s story about capitalist work-horses who suffer and revolt is in a very important sense “based on a true story.” Or rather, it is itself a true story. But notice the paradoxical quality of the expression “true story.” Is it a story or is it true? Can it be both? Riley’s film embodies a hope that yes, you can tell the truth about capitalism, so that — as Marx put it — those who hear the story are “at last compelled to face with sober senses [their] real conditions of life, and [their] relations with [their] kind.”

Ultimately, this is Riley’s most audacious ambition, in Sorry to Bother You: to create a film that breaks out of the cinematic enclosure, that defies the constraints of culture-industrial sign-spinning, and that “bursts asunder” the fetters of artistic form in order to attack — rather than simply to narrate — the workings of the capitalist system. This ambition requires him, however, to change his audience, to sober up our senses.

Can a film be true? More to the point, can a film about capitalism avoid being recuperated by the system as just another commodity to make money for the culture-industry? Predictably, Riley sides with Marx, who said: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question…. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Today I was interviewed by Becky Ellis, political ecologist and PhD candidate in geography at Western, for her excellent podcast, ‘Permaculture for the People.’

It was a wide-ranging discussion of climate justice, movement-building, tactics and strategies, prefigurative institution-building and the politics of anti-capitalist hope. Check it out here:

https://permacultureforthepeople.org/2019/01/04/episode-7-building-an-environmental-movement-that-can-win/

You can view other episodes and subscribe via itunes:

https://permacultureforthepeople.org/2019/01/04/episode-7-building-an-environmental-movement-that-can-win/

[Printable PDF]

In the marxist tradition, fascism has typically been understood in terms of a vulnerable ruling class seeking recourse to a populist ‘strong man’ in the face of the threat posed by the organizational power and grassroots militancy of the working class. In the context of a weak and unstable liberal democratic constitutional regime, which limits its capacity to crack down on dissent, capital resorts to an emergency terror, carried out by a demagogic proxy regime, in order to break the resistance of working-class movements (labour and socialist parties, trade unions, workers’ councils, feminist, anti-racist, and national liberation movements, and so on). The aim is to restore capitalist hegemony on the back of a superficially ‘anti-establishment’ but de facto pro-capitalist reign of terror. This approach to understanding fascism, which obviously takes the “völkisch” fascism of Weimar Germany that culminated in the Third Reich as its paradigm or prototype, is rooted in the analysis of right-wing populist ‘strongman’ crackdowns developed by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The understanding of fascism that emerges from this line of thought is typified by that of Trotsky, who said that “the historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Asymmetric Polarization 

As of right now, at the end of October 2018, Trump’s favorability rating is more than 5 percentage points higher than it was when he was elected. His victory was no fluke or freak accident. Nor can Trump’s rise be explained in terms of US politics alone. Rather, it typifies a global trend toward far-right, nationalist, racist, anti-worker forms of authoritarian populism, from Erdogan to Bolsonaro, and from the DFLA to the Proud Boys. It is urgent that we understand the dynamics of this dangerous development. Unfortunately, the ‘classical’ marxist analysis of fascism sketched above may not suffice for this purpose, in this new and different context. For one thing, in our time the rise of far-right authoritarian populisms is in most places not taking place against the backdrop of powerful, insurgent workers’ movements. On the contrary, unions and labour parties, and left social movements generally, are weaker than they have been for many generations, and they pose a very limited threat (in the short to medium term) to capital. Further, it is apparent that today’s far right has a distinctly non-classical aspect insofar as — notwithstanding the unconvincing and half-hearted anti-’free trade’ rhetoric of Trump and others — the new far-right authoritarian populisms are fully committed to an intensification of neoliberalism. The flirtation of early fascism with anti-socialist forms of ‘corporatism’ and authoritarian state planning, familiar from the 1920s and 1930s, is nowhere to be found even in the rhetoric, much less in the practice, of the regimes and movements of the contemporary far right. Today’s rightist, racist authoritarianism is clearly as supportive of the neoliberal policy agenda as it is of capitalism as such.

It should be said that, even if the far right’s recent rise is evidently not a response to working-class insurgency, the political context today is not simply that of an unchallenged right wing resurgence. Rather, the situation is one of asymmetric polarization: both the anti-neoliberal left and the white-nationalist right are growing, at the expense of discredited centrist political parties and currents, but only the growth of the far right has been reflected in widespread electoral successes, and this fact seems to register a comparatively stronger upsurge on the far right and certainly puts greater momentum and resources at its disposal. Even so, the growth of the anti-neoliberal left is indeed a mass phenomenon (in some places), typified in the US by the remarkable increase in membership of the Democratic Socialists of America, and in Britain in the shockingly unexpected sharp left turn of the Labour Party (!) under Corbyn. In a 2018 Gallup poll, Americans expressed a more favourable view of socialism than capitalism. According to Gallup, “Americans aged 18 to 29 are [more] positive about socialism (51%) [than] they are about capitalism (45%). This represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68% viewed it positively.” These numbers are obviously limited in their significance, because they leave terms like socialism and capitalism undefined. If ‘capitalism’ is replaced with ‘free enterprise,’ it instantly becomes much more popular in opinion polls. But they do indicate widespread popular repudiation of the heritage of neoliberalism’s period of ideological ascendancy. The glory days of neoliberalism, when it was deemed to have mass appeal, are over. Now, neoliberalism can only get a hearing from the broad public if it is cloaked in a fake-populist pretense of anti-establishment insurgency. And that is where figures like Trump and Bolsonaro come in: they bear the cloak in which neoliberalism can conceal itself behind a deceptive rhetoric of rebellion against ‘the elites’ and empowerment of ‘ordinary people.’

Neoliberalism’s Crisis of Popular Legitimacy

Indeed, the key to today’s far-right resurgence is that it responds, not to the vulnerability of capital’s hegemony to a militant challenge from the far-left or the wider workers’ movements, but to the collapse of popular legitimacy of the political parties, the political assumptions, and the political institutions of contemporary “bourgeois” (liberal-democratic, pro-capitalist) electoral politics, brought on by decades of neoliberal policy consensus within official party politics. This legitimation crisis — recently expressed in the USA by such insurgent protest movements as the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Movement on the left — has weakened the grip of mainstream ‘centrist’ parties over popular political activity across all classes other than big business. The epochal convergence of labour, liberal, and conservative political parties toward an “extreme centre” of consensus neoliberalism, entailing as it does the rupture of continuity of contemporary social democracy with the Keynesian version of welfare-state politics on the one hand, and the downplaying of ethnocentric nationalism and patriarchal ‘family values’ by establishment conservatism on the other hand, has severed the ties binding the masses on both the (mostly working-class) left and the (mostly middle-class) right to the official political process and its parties. This has opened up spaces to the left and to the right of the ‘extreme centre,’ for forms of political engagement rooted in the revulsion of the broad masses toward the centrist neoliberal project as a whole. The pervasiveness of this revulsion makes it impossible to win broad public approval for open, self-declared neoliberalism. There has to be an anti-establishment cloak of some kind, some promise of a fundamental rupture, for neoliberalism to gain a hearing. And figures like Trump, Bolsonaro and Erdogan take this as their starting-point.

Neoliberal Continuity? Or Proto-fascist Rupture?

But these considerations seem to necessitate that we choose between two competing analyses: Should we regard these far-right ‘strong man’ figures as fundamentally continuous with earlier champions of neoliberalism, substantively, even if they break with them at the level of rhetoric? Or should we regard them, perhaps more ominously, as present-day re-enactors of the fascist versions of pro-capitalist demagogy familiar from an earlier epoch? Applied to the case of the USA, the first option would have us emphasize Trump’s continuity with Obama and Bush at the level of policy, and discourage an undue emphasis on his use of cynical anti-immigrant appeals to boost voter enthusiasm among his ‘base’ of disgruntled middle class racists who reject ‘the political elite’ en masse. The second option, by contrast, would have us interpret Trump as representing a qualitative break with liberal democracy motivated by a proto-fascist rejection of key aspects of official politics and the liberal-democratic constitutional order. The question of which analytical tack to take is made more difficult by the fact that both sides accept, as a matter of course, both that Trump is a racist demagogue whose most ardent supporters are ‘alt-right’ fascists, and that he and his fellow rightists rely on the support of a ruling class that is uncompromisingly committed to the defense and intensification of neoliberalism

In truth, neither analysis — neoliberal continuity nor proto-fascist rupture — is wholly convincing. The problem with the ‘neoliberal continuity’ view is that Trump has clearly actively cultivated an alliance with grassroots militant fascists (the extremists who assembled at the ‘Unite the Right’ fascist rally in Charlottesville in 2017), and signaled with varying degrees of coyness and dog-whistling that he supports their use of extra-constitutional violence against the left, particularly against anti-racists, as well as the lawless persecution of migrant workers (for which he made a point of pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio). Trump is consistent about this. In one case, he encouraged a mob of his supporters to physically attack anti-racist protesters during one of his rallies, and promised to pay the legal fees for any pro-racism fighters. Later, he famously said that there were “very fine people” in the openly fascist, violence-oriented Charlottesville march — a comment he made after the murder of Heather Heyer by one of his supporters from a participating fascist organization. I could enumerate many other examples, but this aspect of Trump’s ‘footsie’ relationship with racist street-violence is well known. Given this aspect of his politics, it is hard to assimilate his political posture to the neoliberal mainstream. Trump’s distance from the mainstream is in this respect not only stylistic, but also substantive, and this lends plausibility to those analyses which emphasize his proximity to traditional fascism

But the discontinuity or ‘proto-fascist rupture’ view also has serious limitations. Trump’s primary political organization is the Republican Party, not one of the many ‘alt-right’ fringe groups, and he works closely with the same politicians that Obama and Bush negotiated with before him, people like Mitch McConnell, et al. In general, Trump usually functions as a conventional US President, trying to get legislation passed in order to help the richest and most powerful people get richer and more powerful. He has shown very little inclination to use the powers of his office directly to carry out state terror campaigns against immigrants, anti-racists or trade unionists, as we might expect a fascist government to do.

Is Trump a Fascist?

The upshot of these considerations is that it seems difficult to say with conviction either that Trump is or that he isn’t a fascist. It may help lend clarity to the discussion to set out a straightforward account of what we mean by the word ‘fascism.’ I define fascism as an anti-democratic regime or social movement, which (i) promotes a leader cult, (ii) claims exemption from constitutional constraints on the legitimate use of force, and (iii) promises an ethnically exclusionary type of national resurgence to be achieved through harsh repression against demonized ‘foreigners’ and ‘subversives.’

Is Trump a fascist, in this sense? If we take this question on its own terms, it can only be answered in the negative. To be sure, he clearly does demonize ‘foreigners’ (migrant workers, Muslims) and to a lesser extent ‘subversives’ (above all, ‘Antifa’), and he does promise national resurgence (‘make america great again’) to be achieved by harsh repression (‘build the wall’, the Muslim travel ban, sending troops to stop the migrant caravan, etc.). Moreover, it would be absurd to deny that he promotes a leader cult, because the hyper-emphatic promotion of his own claim to glory and greatness is by far his main preoccupation. However, in spite of this, Trump, on his own, is not fascist (in the sense set out above) because he does not claim exemption from constitutional constraints on the legitimate use of force, which is one of the key differences between fascists and other conservatives, whose politics otherwise overlap extensively. (For instance, it was a key difference between Hitler and the “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, who anticipated many of Hitler’s policy views, including annexationist pan-German nationalism and the demonization and persecution of religious minorities and political dissidents, but who remained compliant with constitutional constraints.) Trump shows every sign of being willing and able to pursue his far-right agenda within the confines of the constitutional order. So, it seems wrong to call Trump, individually, a fascist, or indeed to call the Republican Party a fascist party.

However, it has to be said that Trump does not operate individually, as a solitary political actor. And the Republican Party is by no means the only organized political force involved in Trump’s ascendancy. Trump himself and his party operate as part of a larger, de-centred constellation of both politicized networks and political organizations, united not always by direct organizational coordination, but instead by their shared affiliation to the Trump leader cult and their shared commitment to the rightist agenda of pursuing (white) national resurgence by targeting “racialized outsiders” (and to a lesser extent, anti-racists) for demonization, repression, and often violence. It is possible to think of Trump as one part of a larger array of political formations that collectively makes crucial use of extra-constitutional violence at the street level that he himself does not actively direct (even if he legitimizes it and provides public rationales for it, such as by declaring that some group should be seen as ‘enemies of the people,’ and so on).

Two-Track Fascism

When we take this larger context or array of forces into account, the question of whether Trump is himself a fascist seems inadequate. The better question would be: Is Trump operating as part of a decentred constellation of political forces which, taken collectively as a complex movement, comprises a political form that fascism sometimes takes today? To that question, the answer may be that, yes, Trump is integral to contemporary fascism in the USA, even if he or his Administration may not be per se fascist. This suggests an analysis that rejects both the neoliberal continuity view and the proto-fascist rupture view, and which instead shifts the focus away from the politics of the leader figure as an individual and toward the constellation of loosely aligned political forces in which the leader operates politically.

According to this “de-centred” analysis, the fascism that exists in the United States (which I’m treating as exemplary, i.e., as analogous to several other similar regimes and movements globally) does not follow the 1920s/1930s model exactly, in that it is not a unitary fascism, in which leader, party, state, street-fighting force, and popular support base are all united in one organized and tightly coordinated bloc. Rather, it is a two-track fascism, with (1) an electoral track, organized inside the Republican Party, closely aligned with Wall Street, where it pursues a policy agenda that cloaks deeply unpopular neoliberal measures behind ‘white nationalist’ rhetoric and high-profile ‘culture-war’ policy fights (about immigration, trans rights, Islam) that have mass appeal to middle class racists, and (2) a street-level track, organized outside of the official political process, in which racist militias and violent white ‘pride’ men’s clubs try to wrest control of the streets and the public sphere from anti-racists, trade unions, feminists, and other democratic forces, and (if they had their way) to create no-go zones for visible minorities (in this respect replicating the classical ‘Freikorps’ model of the völkisch movement in Weimar Germany). What binds the two tracks together is their shared affiliation to the Trump leader cult, and their shared project of ‘making america great again’ by demonizing and targeting migrant workers, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and others for persecution.

In this respect, fascism in the USA is a kind of mutation of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement was crucial in pioneering the idea that a militant grassroots white-nationalist protest movement in civil society (that is, outside the state), with a middle-class base, a hostile attitude to the political process, and a deep contempt for mainstream politicians and liberal constitutionalism, could enter into an alliance with big business, based on both tactical policy convergence and a ruling-class commitment to offer funding for the protests. The Tea Party as such has largely disappeared, but under Trump’s leadership — and under the banner of the ‘alt-right’ fascist revival — it was reassembled in the form of a motley constellation of far right militias, white supremacy ‘pride’ fraternities, neo-Nazi revivalist cults, and other more or less radicalized MAGA-vigilante groups and individuals, informally but in most cases fanatically aligned with Trump’s electoral track project.

The fascists who operate in this extra-constitutional ‘street-level’ track know that Trump is on their side, and accept that he cannot fully say or do anything that his location in the official political process precludes. But they know that they, by contrast, are free from such political constraints. As the point was put by one Trump-inspired armed attacker, who recently carried out a terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Because the violent, extra-constitutional, street-level track operates independently of Trump, it can carry out aspects of the MAGA agenda that Trump is assumed by the militant fascists to be tacitly favorable toward, but which he is unable to explicitly defend. For his part, Trump never tires of signalling his sympathy for their motives, if not for their every action.

The Limits of Today’s Two-Track Fascist Movement in the US

From this point of view, Trump’s “white nationalist” intervention in electoral politics forms an integral part of a single (albeit de-centred and dual-track) movement with the ongoing sequence of violent interventions by street-level fascists of the Charlottesville rally variety. These street-level fascist interventions include beatings, death threats, armed patrols, mass shootings, and assassination attempts. As ominous as this development is, it is important not to misunderstand the phenomenon of two-track fascism, in particular by overstating its capacities. Of the two tracks, the electoral track is the stronger and more potent, but neither track has accumulated capacities remotely comparable to those of Hitler’s Third Reich or the Italian Fascists under Mussolini. Wall Street neoliberalism is still by far the most powerful political force in US politics. In the US, to be sure, the Trump Administration has given fascist politics — and relatively open fascists intellectuals, like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — a relevance to mainstream politics that their ilk had been denied for generations. But both the street fighting and terror capacity of the street-level track, and the grip of Trump and his inner circle on the vast apparatus of the US state, remain rather limited. The parts of Trump’s policy agenda that find their way into US law consist almost exclusively of those elements of it that are acceptable to the Mitch McConnell types that comprise the Republican Party establishment (and their co-thinkers in the Democratic Party), who are all stalwart defenders of the neoliberal consensus: massive tax cuts for the rich, gutting forms of regulation once intended to limit capital in the public interest, the continuation of re-branded free-trade agreements, endless squandering of public money on military buildups and the expansion of police powers and prisons, and so on. Meanwhile, there is still no border wall, no reinstatement of a whites-only immigration policy, no wholesale rolling back of civil rights legislation, and so on. The ruling class still largely dictates what governments can do, and that means that the neoliberal agenda remains the driving force of US government policy. Meanwhile, the street level fascists are continually humiliated by powerful ‘antifa’ mobilizations that rout them in the streets and repeatedly drive them into tactical retreat, far more often than they succeed in winning the day. The fascists do certainly carry out killings and beatings, so I do not wish to minimize the threat they already pose, but they are by no means capable of exerting the kind of power over the streets that they aspire to wield or that more powerful fascist movements have wielded in the past.

In short, two-track fascism represents a grave and growing danger, but its freedom to maneuver is limited by the fact that the niche it has found near the centre of US politics hinges on its usefulness to the ruling class as a way to cope with neoliberalism’s chronic crisis of popular legitimacy.

Some Key Aspects of the Left Response

Anti-fascist feminists mobilize against the DFLA

The response of anti-fascists to the present situation should be to navigate a course between the danger of complacency on the on hand, and the danger of panic on the other. Fascists are actually still relatively marginal, and most people reject their politics out of hand. But the roots of fascist upsurge in the legitimation crisis provoked by the neoliberal policy convergence of the extreme centre isn’t going away. As long as the anti-neoliberal, authentically anti-establishment far left cannot yet mount a credible alternative to the neoliberal centre (Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, et al.), the far right will try to fill the vacuum with the kind of fake-populist white-supremacist politics that fuels Trump’s ascendancy and energizes his street-level fascist collaborators. The main strategic implications of this analysis seem clear. I will highlight three points.

1. First, it is necessary for anti-fascists to mobilize always and everywhere to try to deny the street-level fascists access to public space, making it effectively impossible for them to hold events in public. By driving them out of public space, we can isolate their core activists from the periphery of bigots that they want to recruit, demoralizing them and driving them back to the internet chat rooms and websites where they were largely confined before Trump’s election gave them a new confidence to organize openly. Realistically, we know that the police will always try to defend them and criminalize anti-fascist activity, and this makes our task more difficult. But with solidarity, militancy and determination we have shown that we can defeat them in the streets, more often than not.
2. Second, since the strength of two-track fascism depends crucially on Trump’s alliance, at the level of policy, with Wall Street neoliberalism (mediated by Trump’s cooperation with the GOP establishment), it is necessary for anti-fascists to find ways to raise the costs of this alliance for Wall Street forces and the GOP itself. How to do so is a tactical question, which depends on the context. But generally speaking, anti-fascists have to expose the alliance and ensure that those who fund Trump or lend support to any aspect of two-track fascism are ‘tarred with the brush’ of fascist sympathies and are held accountable for the violence of the street-level fascists and the anti-democratic and white-supremacist features of Trump’s program and ideological posture. Trump’s funders, collaborators, and enablers all have to be exposed and held accountable. Brand-sensitive targets, such as corporations and politicians, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of pressure.
3. Third, the far left has to work toward developing the capacity to hegemonize (gain leadership over and draw support from) the popular mood of revulsion against the hated neoliberal consensus of the extreme centre. In the US, it is obvious that the Democratic Party is hopelessly incapable of appealing to this sentiment, or rather it is completely uninterested in doing so because it is itself so deeply committed to the political project of upholding neoliberalism. By contrast, the Democratic Socialists of America, and before that the Sanders campaign, have tried to tap into the anti-neoliberal sentiment on the basis of some kind of left critique, with some degree of success. Whether the DSA (or Sanders) have the politics needed to follow through on these opportunities and develop a real challenge to both the neoliberal extreme centre and the far-right phenomenon of two-track fascism, is debatable, but this question is beyond the scope of the present discussion. What is crucial is just to be clear that defeating two-track fascism will remain a futile “labour of Sisyphus” unless the left can build itself up as a pole of attraction drawing energy and popular support from working-class revulsion against neoliberalism. Until our side develops that capacity, the right will continually benefit from anti-establishment anger that ought instead to be the main engine of left radicalization and anti-capitalist revolt.

Note: One of the most important documents in the history of the Left inside the Canadian state, the Dene Declaration of 1975 was ridiculed at the time by the Canada’s ‘Minister of Indian Affairs’ as “gobbledygook” — a sure sign that the Declaration had exposed an area of acute sensitivity for the state, namely, its settler-colonial foundations. Although very widely read in the 1970s and beyond by both Indigenous and settler leftists, in recent decades it has been a bit hard to find on the Internet (or in print, for that matter) the full text (including not just the ‘manifesto’ but also the other, more fully elaborated historical and strategic parts), and I believe this may be the only HTML version of the whole document available at this time. I prepared this version based on the text given in a document entitled IBNWT Land Claim: Handbook for the Northern Claims Group (November 1977). (For some background and analysis of the Declaration and its place in the history of Dene politics and land claims, see Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, chapter 2.)

The politics of the Declaration are as relevant as ever, and the analysis holds up extremely well in the present context, so it really deserves a wider readership than it has had in recent years. (Click for printable PDF version)

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THE DENE DECLARATION (1975)

General Assembly, Indian Brotherhood of NWT (Dene Nation), Ft Simpson, 19 July 1975

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Contents

1. Historical Introduction
2. Examples of Specific Declarations
   1. Declaration on Development
   2. Declaration on Role of Native Organizations
   3. Statement on Strategy and Organizing
3. The Dene Manifesto

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Historical Introduction

1. The situation, historically and today, has been to the disadvantage of the Dene Nation. Industry, and government have said one thing to the people and done another. It is time for us to speak the truth.
2. Take, for example, the Treaties. The Indian people signed the Treaties in good faith, believing them to be no more than treaties of peace and friendship. When we had doubts and refused to sign, the Government was not above forging signatures. Since that time the Government has said that the Treaties were land cession treaties, and absurdly insisted that we sold our land for $5 a year each.
3. Our land, first slowly and now more rapidly, has been overrun by explorers, traders, developers and government officials. They are the agents of a European system, and they have come to exploit the land and resources for the betterment of the few who control industry and big business. The nature of the industrial culture that increasingly penetrates the North is such that a few will profit while the majority of the people, whether native or white, are kept powerless.
4. In the beginning our people saw little harm in letting the early explorers and traders come to the North, for the goods that they brought somewhat compensated for their being here. But more and more people came. The level of interference with the old ways increased. We can no longer let things go on because very shortly we will not be able to live off the land as we have from time immemorial.
5. We no longer have any alternative but to take over control of developments in the North. We must have the right to decide not only when development occurs, but what kind of development takes place and for whose benefit.
6. Since the coming of the whiteman, and industrial development, the Dene have been encouraged to join in his system of competition. But this nation has withstood the pressure. We have not adopted this alien system that puts one person against another because we have our own ways of sharing wealth and resources. Always we have taken care of the young, the old and the disadvantaged. We intend to maintain our sharing and egalitarian society.
7. We are a nation, a people with a long history and a whole culture, a culture which has survived the invasion of our land. Although this is a fact of which all of us are aware — since we are the people of the Dene Nation — we still must make this statement because others do not know or admit of our existence as a nation.
8. We make this statement because some of our young, being educated in a foreign educational system, are getting confused and are unaware of how they can contribute to our people. Also, some of our people who are becoming involved with industry and government are slowly coming to believe in their ways and are forgetting where they came from. They need clear direction.
9. We have lost control of our own lands. The present legal system, the Territorial and Federal Government systems, the educational system, the industrial economy — all are foreign and oppressive in their present forms. Real power lies with a handful of large companies who operate with the full co-operation of both the Territorial and Federal governments.
10. These same companies operate in other parts of the world, in the poor countries known as the Third World. The companies go in and exploit the non-renewable resources of these countries to serve the purpose of making profits for themselves and providing resources to the already rich and developed countries. Some of the people in the poor country get jobs, but they are locked into a factory system and a consumer, society where they are powerless and where they have to strive to better themselves as individuals rather than work for the benefit of the masses of people.
11. There are many lessons for the Dene to learn from the development of the Third World countries. As colonies of the imperial powers, they everywhere failed to develop. Their prospects necessarily improved to the extent that they were successful in gaining independence. But even after formal political independence, many have had trouble developing because the power of the so-called multinational corporations, with their base in a small number of highly developed industrial societies, has denied their genuine economic independence. Only with tremendous effort from the people can an economy independent from outside controls be built.
12. Our situation in the North is the same as that of the peoples of the Third World who were until recently subjugated. As aboriginal people within a white society, we are a part of the Fourth World. We have been made Canadians by decree and not by our free choice.
13. Understandably our first choice would be to be once again a sovereign people. But we are realistic and know the whiteman is powerful. At the same time, we native people are still the majority within the North. We are in a unique situation in North America and we should take advantage of our situation before it is too late.
14. Our survival as a people compels us to assert our right to maximum independence within Canada. We must develop our own economy and must acquire political independence for the Dene nation within the Canadian constitution. We must be able to govern our own lands and resources.
15. Thus our land claim must include not only the surface of the land, but the animals, the fish, the birds, the rivers and streams and the minerals underneath. And, most important of all, we must have our own system of government by which we can control and develop our land for our benefit.
16. Our aboriginal rights are meaningless if they do hot mean the exclusive right to hunt, fish and trap. And that right, in turn, will have little meaning in the long run unless Indian people are allowed to stop the damage to their land that results from present unplanned developments.
17. Where developments, as in mining, have already taken place, or for future development which we would be prepared to tolerate, we are entitled, as owners of the land, to receive royalties. Thes royalties could be paid cut of the profits of the companies and  need be no burden on the Canadian people. We would, in turn, use these royalties to fund community economic development that will last after the companies have exhausted the non-renewable resources.
18. We must develop plans to start our ovm economy at the community level. The present colonial pattern of development attempts to integrate us into a wage economy, as employees of companies over which we have no control. We want to strengthen our traditional land-based economy and at the same time create viable enterprises in the communities under the collective control of Indian people. That way our young people will have the chance to remain in the community rather than always having to move away, and even risk losing their identity, to find employment.
19. We must become involved in the education of our children in communities where Dene are in the majority. Local schools must be controlled by our people. In cases like Yellowknife, or hostels where we are not the majority, we must have involvement — or start our own schools.
20. Where outside governments have a continuing role after a land settlement, there must be a clear recognition of our rights as a distinct people, particularly at the local level. For example, native communities must have very clear powers with respect to control of alcohol.
21. In the communities, power should lie with the band council and, in the future, with the Dene Council.
22. Territorial Council must operate in such a way as not to infringe native rights. The same must be true if the day should come when a white majority in the North successfully demands provincial status.
23. Without in any way abrogating our rights as the original inhabitants of the land, we recognise that non-native residents of the North who choose to make the North their home and respect our rights are themselves entitled to greater rights, in territorial and local elections, than are those who are merely transient.
24. Our own native organizations must themselves evolve so as to be able in due course to assume these new functions. In their operations and structures, they must become examples of our ideals.
25. To achieve all of this will not be easy. There is much work ahead of us, internally and externally. It will take effort from all the communities. A united effort is required on all issues involving the step-by-step achievement of our long term goals of maximum independence for the Dene Nation. Unless we are united among ourselves, we have little hope of winning a struggle so difficult as the one we are now engaged in.
26. We must unite our people at all levels — between communities, between families, between Treaty, non-status and Métis, between young and old, between the traditionalists and the non-traditionalists, between regions, between tribes, between men and women. We must be prepared to identify and deal with enemies within as as well as enemies without.
27. We must have strong leadership supported by the communities. It is the duty of leadership to lead the way for development of the people and to support directions. But the leadership must always listen to the people and be prepared to build on creative energy of the people. It must always be accountable to the people through open and honest dialogue.
28. Although a united front is expected and required from all the communities on issues that have been sanctioned at general assemblies and have survived deliberation at the community level, this does not at all mean that people must remain quiet about those things that are remiss. Quite the contrary. Community people must make it their responsibility to confront our leadership either at the local level or at its highest level in those cases where justice has not prevailed. The more people demonstrate their true feelings and desires to the leadership, the greater the ability of the leadership to avoid errors and to implement what is in priority with local needs and desires.
29. With strong leadership, we must have clear ideals and goals for our people. The people’s true needs and desires must be reflected in the goals and action. Communities must be thoroughly involved at every level of this total development. At no time should any goal or action be beyond thorough examination and not fit the ideals of the nation. Goals and ideals should be revised by the people as situations change requiring new directions.
30. Externally, we must again become a people making our own history. We must become actors, not just be acted upon by companies and government. The highway, proposed pipeline and dams, indeed, even the layout of our communities — all are other people’s plans to which we have been allowed at best only to react. We must become actors, planners, in control of development within our communities and our land. We must develop our own plans for development that will benefit our communities and all our people.
31. To be able to make our own history is to be able to mould our own future, to build the new Indian society of the North that preserves the best of our past and our traditions while enabling us to grow and develop as a whole people. We want to build a society in which there is equality of all Dene people, and a society free of exploitative relationships between people. We are not opposed to change, but it must be on our terms under our control. To assert that right is to assume a great task, one at which we cannot afford to fail.
32. We know that there are powerful forces arranged against us. That is why we have not hesitated to appeal to others to support us in our just struggle. We ask that there be no major developments, like a pipeline, before a land settlement acceptable to us. We ask that we be allowed, in negotiating with the government toward a land settlement, to put forward our demands as they stand. We ask that our rights as a people for self-determination within Canada be respected.
33. The great majority of people in Canada are like ourselves in being relatively powerless in the face of big companies and by governments. In the face of our assertion of our rights, the choice that others must make is between ourselves, on the [one] hand, and the outside developers that are increasingly accountable to no one, on the other hand. By joining us in our struggle people can begin as well to liberate themselves.
34. We, the Dene, must all work together to a successful land claims settlement. This will be a big achievement in itself. It then becomes the means to achieve our real needs. Those needs are a land base and the political controls to determine what happens on our land. Above all, independence within Canada.

Examples of Specific Declarations

Declaration on Development

1. What other people may call development is not necessarily development for Indian people. Only Dene people can say what development means for the Dene nation. For example, many people say that the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline is “development,” but this is not true for the Dene people. The pipeline may not only damage our land, but it might destroy our way of life as a nation. True development can only strengthen our nation and our way of life.
2. The people of the African country Tanzania were, like the Dene people, also invaded by a white colonial government. Today they are independent and they say this about development:
   “Any action which does not increase the people’s say in determining their own affairs or running their own lives is not development and holds them down, even if the action brings them a little better health and a little more bread.”
   In other words, we cannot, call development any activity which takes away control from  our people. True development must give us more control and greater independence.
3. True development means  growth in Indian communities … not only economic development but cultural, social, political and spiritual development … and the sum of these is greater than the parts.
4. True development means building on the past, by strengthening traditional pursuits, by drawing on the community’s experience, and by building on traditional skills.
5. True development means that development is implemented in a way that fits the Indian way of doing things (which is not the same as the government’s way or the companies’ way).
6. True development means a process which unites and builds up the community’s sense of self and the sense of self of all its members.
7. True development means development by the community rather than by outsiders. It means development by the community as a whole wherever possible, rather than by individuals within the community for their own benefit.
8. True development means not participating, even as workers, in activities you cannot control. If such developments go ahead anyway (such as large resource developments), Indian people, as owners of the resource should benefit from royalties, and the political rights of Indian people (which would be threatened by an influx of white workers) would be protected by entrenching them as part of the land settlement.
9. True development means learning by doing so that development becomes an on-going, self-reinforcing process.
10. True development means getting expertise when it is needed in the form of short-term technical assistance without giving up ownership (even of the joint venture variety).
11. True development means communities cooperating with each other, regionally, and in the Mackenzie District as a whole (unity means power).
12. True development means long-term planning and setting priorities (since it’s impossible to do everything)
13. True development means keeping our egalitarian and sharing society. 
14. True development means setting an example for Canada.

Declaration on the Role of Native Organizations

The following should be the most important goals of our organizations:

1. To re-establish control of our independent Dene confederacy.
2. To assert the common identity of our people — Dene concept.
3. To obtain for every Dene community an adequate economic base to preserve its independence.
4. To be a vehicle for providing the solid support of the Dene people to band councils, Métis locals, and other Dene groups in their efforts in social, cultural, educational, spiritual, and economic development. To speak as one voice for the Dene people on major political issues, and work with other native organizations.
5. To fight racism,
   • by helping to overcome the ignorance in white society with regard to Dene peoples,
   • by working to overcome economic inequality,
   • by overcoming cultural and political domination through strengthening Dene culture and independence.
6. To be an example of our ideals in operations and structure.
7. To create a continuing dialogue between leadership and the Dene people, so that all benefit and develop using each others understanding and experience.
8. To establish ties, to support, and cooperate v/ith other movements and efforts which contribute to the goal of independence and freedom for all people.
9. To build a society in which there is equality of all Dene people, and a Society free of exploitative relationships between people.

We can best achieve these goals in the following ways:

1. By making a good land settlement our first priority.
2. By abolishing colonial controls. This means forcing the government to recognize the authority of our chosen political structures, whether the Band Council/Métis Local or Indian Brotherhood/Métis Association. It also means involving ourselves only in developments we can control. Finally, it means reducing our dependence on government funding, because this kind of funding gives the government too much control.
3. By political and cultural education. It is the duty of leaders and people to learn about our nation and about the nature of the rest of the world — e.g, the oil companies, Canadian Society, colonialism. We should not keep our ideas to ourselves but meet with each other to discuss and exchange our understandings. This kind of dialogue contributes to true development.
4. By building a communal economy where the benefits of development are shared by the whole community according to need and where no individual benefits at the expense of his community.
5. By cooperation and sharing between communities in economic development.
6. By improving communication amongst our people: between leaders and people, between communities, between individuals.
7. By keeping maximum control in the hands of each community while maintaining a strong united front to the outside world.
8. By reducing inequalities amongst our people, especially in our organizations. By creating democratic and egalitarian organizations of our own and rejecting the white way with a boss at the top with all the control and workers at the bottom with no control.
9. By eliminating discrimination because of age or sex. Young and old, man and woman must participate as equals in rebuilding our nation.

Statement on Strategy and Organizing for Achievement of Our Goals

1. Our goal is maximum independence and self-determination of the Dene Nation within the Country of Canada through a just and equitable land settlement.
2. The struggle for achieving our goals involves organizing and strategy on two fronts: The external front and the internal front.
3. Our struggle is like a war, but a peaceful one. On each front there is an enemy. On each front there are allies.
4. On the external front the enemy is those not a part of the Dene Nation who resist and deny the achievement of our goals such as the government and other people who do not want to see the recognition and self-determination of the Dene Nation
5. On the internal front the biggest enemy is ourselves, our disunity and lack of organization.
6. There are also Dene who are the enemy. There are Dene who would betray and are betraying their brothers in the struggle for their goal. These are Dene who work for the enemy against their brothers. These are traitors to the cause of the Dene Nation. We must learn to identify such persons.
7. There are also Dene who hold back the cause by forgetting who the real enemy is. These are Dene who prefer to fight amongst themselves rather than against the real enemy.
8. There are Dene who have not yet learned who the real enemy is. It is the duty and responsibility of Dene who have learned to recognize the real enemy to educate their brothers.
9. The struggle involves then the simultaneous battle on two fronts, internally and externally. While we organize and plan to build a strong organization and unity of all our people we must also organize and plan to defeat the enemy without.
10. Organizing and planning on the internal front means building unity and strength. It means breaking down that which divides us and educating our people and organizing so as to defeat the enemy without.
11. In fighting the enemy without we must at all costs keep a united front whatever our differences. We must always keep our differences to ourselves and solve our differences amongst ourselves. We must never fight amongst ourselves before the enemy.
12. We must accept that there now are real differences amongst us and always will be differences. But if we remain committed to our goal our differences will not defeat us. If we constantly remember that defeating the enemy is more important than our differences, we can solve the problems created by our differences.
13. Our differences are real. The most serious differences are between the Treaties versus the Non-Treaty and Métis and between the young and the old.
14. As long as we remember that there are differences between Indian and Métis, but that  it is more important to remain united against the enemy than to fight amongst ourselves, we will be in a position to solve our differences ourselves.
15. The old people are our strength and wisdom. They are our roots to our history, tradition and cultures. The young people bring energy and knowledge of the enemy to the struggle. They are the link to the future. But the experience of the young people is much different to that of the old people. Often the old people do not understand and respect the young people. Often the young .people do not understand the old people. What we must always strive for is an understanding and respect of the young for the old and the old for the young. Without that understanding and respect, we will fail, for the past will become separated from the future. In fighting the enemy on the external front we must always remember that the way of the European is different from that of the Dene. We must always remember that the situation is constantly changing. Each one of us must bear the burden of keeping ourselves informed on each change so that we can easily adapt and change our strategies so as to defeat the enemy.

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The Dene Manifesto

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     We the Dene of the Northwest Territories insist on the right to be regarded by ourselves and the world as a nation.

     Our struggle is for the recognition of the Dene Nation by the Government and people of Canada and the peoples and governments of the world.

    As once Europe was the exclusive homeland of the European peoples, Africa the exclusive homeland of the African peoples, the New World, North and South America, was the exclusive homeland of Aboriginal peoples of the New World, the Amerindian and the Inuit.

    The New World like other parts of the world has suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism. Other peoples have occupied the land — often with force — and foreign governments have imposed themselves on our people. Ancient civilizations and ways of life have been destroyed.

    Colonialism and imperialism are now dead or dying. Recent years have witnessed the birth of new nations or rebirth of old nations out of the ashes of colonialism.    

    As Europe is the place where you will find European countries with European governments for European peoples, now also you will find in Africa and Asia the existence of African and Asian countries with African and Asian governments for the African and Asian peoples.

    The African and Asian peoples — the peoples of the Third World — have fought for and won the right to self-determination, the right to recognition as distinct peoples and the recognition of themselves as nations.

    But in the New World the Native peoples have not fared so well. Even in countries in South America, where the Native peoples are the vast majority of the population, there in not one country which has an Amerindian government for the Amerindian peoples.

    Nowhere in the New World have the Native peoples won the right to self- determination and the right to recognition by the world as a distinct people and as Nations. While the Native people of Canada are a minority in their homeland, the Native people of the Northwest Territories, the Dene and the Inuit, are a majority of the population of the Northwest Territories.

    The Dene find themselves as part of a country. That country is Canada. But the Government of Canada is not the Government of the Dene. The Government of the Northwest Territories is not the Government of the Dene. These governments were not the choice of the Dene, they were imposed upon the Dene.

    What we the Dene are struggling for is the recognition of the Dene nation by the governments and peoples of the world.

    And while there are realities we are forced to submit to, such as the’ existence of a country called Canada, we insist on the right to self-determination as a distinct people and the recognition of the Dene Nation.

    We the Dene are part of the Fourth World. And as the peoples and Nations of the world have come to recognize the existence and rights of those peoples who make up the Third World the day must come when the nations of the Fourth World will come to be recognized and respected. The challenge to the Dene and the world is to find the way for the recognition of the Dene Nation.

    Our plea to the world is to help us in our struggle to find a place in the world community where we can exercise our right to self-determination as a distinct people and as a nation.

    What we seek then is independence and self-determination within the country of Canada. This is what we mean when we call for a just land settlement for the Dene nation.

By Stephen D’Arcy

Sometimes, when reading Rosa Luxemburg’s great book, The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that one is receiving a clear, compelling explanation of the main trajectory of Canadian history — even when she never says a word about Canada. In the passages reproduced below, she walks us through an analysis of how capitalism was in its origins, and is still today, driven (by its relentless drive for profits) to seek control over the lands and resources of Indigenous peoples. When it finds Indigenous societies unwilling or unable to engage in commodity exchange, capitalism “knows no other solution to the problem than violence, which has been a constant method of capital accumulation as a historical process, not merely during its emergence, but also to the present day.”

Luxemburg reminds us, though, that the colonial violence of capitalist settler states does not go unchallenged. “For the [Indigenous] societies, on the other hand, since in such cases it is a question of their very existence, the only possible course of action is to engage in resistance and a life-or-death struggle….” The main conclusion of her analysis is that capitalism, by its very nature, is driven to pursue “the systematic, planned destruction and annihilation of any non-capitalist social formation that it encounters.” Capitalism’s logic, according to Luxemburg, is strictly genocidal.

To convey the outlines of her analysis, I reproduce here a few paragraphs from her book. (Note: some breaks between paragraphs have been added, to make it easier to read online.)

“….[C]apitalism above all wages a constant war of annihilation everywhere against any historical form of natural [that is, subsistence-based, pre-capitalist] economy that it encounters….The economic goals pursued by capitalism in its struggle with societies based on a natural economy…[include attempting] to gain direct control over important sources of the forces of production, such as land, wild game in the jungles, minerals, precious stones and ores, the products of exotic flora, such as rubber, etc….During original accumulation, i.e., during the historical emergence of capitalism in Europe at the end of the middle Ages, the dispossession of the peasants in the U.K. and on the [European] continent represented the most tremendous means for transforming the means of production and labour-power into capital on a massive scale. Since then, however, and to the present day, this same task has been accomplished under the rule of capital through an equally tremendous, although completely different, means: modern colonial policy.

“It is illusory to hope that capitalism could ever be satisfied with the means of production that it is able to procure by means of the exchange of commodities. Indeed, the difficulty for capital in this respect consists in the fact that, over vast expanses of the exploitable surface of the globe, the productive forces are in the possession of social formations that either have no inclination to exchange commodities or, worse still, cannot offer for sale the most important means of production on which capital depends, because their forms of property and social structures as a whole preclude this a priori [in advance]. This goes above all for the land, with all its rich mineral resources underground and its wealth of pastures, forests, and waterways on the surface, and also for the livestock of…pastoral peoples.

“From the standpoint of capitalism, the inference to be drawn here is that the violent appropriation of the colonial countries’ most important means of production is a question of life or death for it. However, since the…social bonds of the indigenous inhabitants constitute the strongest bulwark both of their societies and of the latter’s material basis of existence, what ensues is that capital introduces itself through the systematic, planned destruction and annihilation of any non-capitalist social formation that it encounters.

“This is no longer a question of original accumulation [at the dawn of capitalist development]: this is a process that continues to this day. Each new colonial expansion is accompanied by capital’s relentless war on the social and economic interrelations of the indigenous inhabitants and by the violent looting of their means of production and their labour-power. The aspiration to restrict capitalism to ‘peaceful competition,’ i.e., to commodity exchange proper, as it occurs between capitalist producing countries, rests on the doctrinaire delusion that the accumulation of capital could manage without the productive forces and demand of the [pre-capitalist] social formations, and that it could rely on the slow, internal process of the disintegration of the natural economy….Capital knows no other solution to the problem than violence, which has been a constant method of capital accumulation as a historical process, not merely during its emergence, but also to the present day.

“For the [Indigenous] societies, on the other hand, since in such cases it is a question of their very existence, the only possible course of action is to engage in resistance and a life-or-death struggle….Hence permanent military occupation of the colonies, indigenous uprisings, and expeditions to crush these are the order of the day for any colonial regime. These violent methods are here the direct consequence of the clash between capitalism and the natural [subsistence] economic formations that represent constraints upon its accumulation.

“The means of production and labour-power of these formations, as well as their demand for the capitalist surplus product, are indispensable to capitalism itself. In order to wrest these means of production and this labour-power from these formations, and to convert them into purchasers of its commodities, capitalism strives purposefully to annihilate them as independent social structures. From the standpoint of capital, this method is the most expedient, because it is simultaneously the one that is most rapid and most profitable…. British policy in India and that of the French in Algeria represent the classical examples of capital’s application of this method.”

[Source: Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Chapter 27]

It’s probably worth adding to the above passages the following paragraph, in which Luxemburg draws attention to a commonality between the anti-capitalist struggles of European workers and the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous and other colonized people around the world:

“The bourgeoisie, clearly affected in their class interests, scented an obscure connection between the ancient communist survivals that put up stubborn resistance in the colonial countries to the forward march of the profit-hungry ‘Europeanization’ of the indigenous people, and the new gospel of revolutionary impetuousness of the proletarian mass in the old capitalist countries. When the French National Assembly was deciding the fate of the unfortunate Arabs of Algeria in 1873, with a law on the compulsory introduction of private property, it was repeatedly said, in a gathering where the cowardice and bloodlust of the conquerors of the Paris Commune [anti-capitalist workers’ revolt] still trembled, that the ancient common property of the Arabs must at any cost be destroyed, ‘as a form that supports communist tendencies in people’s minds.'”

[Source: Luxemburg, “Introduction to Political Economy” (More precisely, p. 163 of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings I)]

(The following is the text of a talk I gave at a recent conference, in June 2017. The fact that it was written for oral delivery accounts for some of its features, e.g., the minimal references, etc.)

In recent years, Jane McAlevey, the influential labour organizer and labour studies academic, has mounted a vigorous case for what she calls “the organizing model” of movement-building. The key features of the model, and the arguments she makes on its behalf, are drawn from reflection on her experiences over many years in trade union organizing. McAlevey is quite insistent, however, that this same model is the only model — literally, the only one — that can effectively contribute to movement building more broadly, that is, not just in trade union struggles, but in workers’ struggles against racism, colonialism, sexism, police violence, environmental destruction, and so on. She regards the organizing model, in short, as the exclusive and all purpose model for rebuilding all anti-systemic movements very generally.

What is striking and provocative in her claim is not so much the idea that the organizing model she proposes could help these movements, as part of a larger repertoire of movement-building approaches. That seems uncontroversial enough. What is provocative is her claim that only the organizing model can build real power for social movements, and everything else is bound to fail.

Of course, since some of the most high-profile social-movement upsurges of the past several years, including Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and even the Arab Spring, were what she calls “mobilizations,” not organizing projects, her bold claim has the remarkable implication that none of these movements either were in fact effective, or even had the possibility of being effective, at building oppositional social power.

BLM, OWS, and INM: Real or Pretend Power?

McAlevey does not shy away from explicitly drawing out and defending this conclusion. When asked about Black Lives Matter and the early wave of anti-Trump protests in the early months of 2017, she says: “All that protest stuff is good for activists, but if we are trying to expand the universe of people who identify with making progressive change, we ain’t close to the numbers we need.” On her website, she adds that “movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter lack an organized base, and therefore are unable to build the power to effect meaningful change.”

More provocatively still, in her book No Shortcuts, she makes it clear that she classifies the kind of power that is generated by these surging waves of street protest as instances of what she calls “pretend power,” which is to say, a dramaturgical or staged presentation of apparent influence. Pretend power contrasts with what she calls “actual power,” which is the tested capacity to extract reluctant concessions from even determined adversaries.

Mobilizations of pretend power, even on a large scale, as in the case of the anti-globalization movement of the early 2000s, she says, accomplish little or nothing: “I used to go to more anti-globalization protests, direct actions and other things when I was young, but I just stopped.” Pulling no punches, she explains why: “It looks great, we congratulate ourselves when we have a huge direct action, but it adds up to nothing.”

This gloomy sense that mobilizations, even on the mass scale of “a huge direct action,” will inevitably “add up to nothing,” resonates with many people who have found themselves working through what has become an all too familiar cycle of protest upsurges, in which a rapid rise is followed by a relatively short-lived peak of activity, ending with an equally rapid decline and near total disappearance. The sense that spontaneous or self-activating protest upsurges, like Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter, may have a time-limited life-span of a couple of years before they lose their steam, leaving little or no ongoing movement infrastructure in their wake, has encouraged a fairly widespread mood of disenchantment with instances of mobilization that don’t convert into organization-building more or less directly. Seeing how little these upsurges leave behind leads many people to consider, in reflecting on their own activity, that their tireless efforts to build the protests were, to some significant degree, wasted.

McAlevey has a diagnosis ready-made to appeal to this mood of disenchantment. The problem, she argues, is that the model being pursued by movement participants is deeply flawed.

McAlevey makes the point by sketching two models of movement building, the mobilizing model and the organizing model. (She contrasts these with a third model, less important either to her or to me, called the advocacy model, closely associated with staff-led NGOs relying on a passive donor base and/or foundation funding.) Since her depiction of the “mobilizing model” is so saturated with dismissiveness and polemical caricature, it would be pointless to recount what she says about it, but it is worth looking for a moment at McAlevey’s organizing model, to see what it would mean to generalize it and put it at the very centre of our movement-building efforts, in environmental, feminist, anti-racist and other movement building activity in the broad workers movements.

In this talk, I want to argue that, in spite of the many strengths of the organizing model, and the real plausibility of McAlevey’s claim that the model can be a potent asset in the context of trade union movement building, there are strong reasons to doubt the generalizability of the model to other workers’ movements, such as movements against police violence, movements for climate justice, movements against sexism and Islamophobia, and so on. The key barrier to generalizing from union activity to social movement building generally is that the organizing model requires, as one of its central principles, that organizing be restricted to what she calls “bounded constituencies,” such as individual workplaces, or specific houses of faith, like a church, a mosque or a synagogue. This, in turn, makes the organizing model structurally impervious to, that is, impenetrable by, decentred influxes of popular self-activity of the sort that unfold during spontaneous protest upsurges.

My basic claim is that no model of movement building that refuses even to attempt to integrate people who flow through movements during protest upsurges can be sufficient, on its own, as a basis for a broad anti-systemic movement-rebuilding strategy.

The rest of my talk makes this case in three steps:

1. First, I recount the core features of the organizing model itself, highlighting the importance of bounded constituencies in the model.
2. Second, I briefly note four features of the dynamics of social contagion as they play out in spontaneous or self-activating protest upsurges, which both make these upsurges a precious resource that we ought to try to capitalize on in our movement-rebuilding strategy, and make it impossible to do so within the confines of the organizing model, restricted as the latter is to what McAlevey calls the “target rich environment” of bounded constituencies.
3. Finally, third, I sketch the elements of a competing, self-mobilization model that I think should supplement the organizing model, as part of a complex and differentiated approach to rebuilding anti-systemic workers’ movements.

* * *

The Contours of the Organizing Model

OK, so what are the basic contours of McAlevey’s model? The first, and in my view the most important feature of the organizing model is that it operates always in what McAlevey calls a bounded constituency (see No Shortcuts, pp. 13-14). A bounded constituency is a spatially confined location, where a substantial but not indefinitely expansive number of people come together and interact regularly, such they all could change their lives for the better if they were to use collective action to extract concessions from elites. The primary paradigm instance of a bounded constituency is a workplace. Other examples mentioned by McAlevey include a public school, a social housing complex, and a racially segregated neighbourhood.

What this is meant to exclude is unbounded constituencies, such as workers in general, or precarious workers, or women, or students, or migrant workers, or trans workers, and so on.

With this crucial point in mind, let me lay out the basics of the organizing model in seven basic points, which for simplicity I will describe — somewhat superficially, I admit — as if they were sequential steps.

1. First, identify a bounded constituency of people, the members of which could be motivated to make some positive change in their lives via collective action.
2. Second, identify the natural leaders within the bounded constituency and recruit them to the organizing process.
3. Third, collectively begin to map out the power structure of the bounded constituency, and its relation to the wider community, to reveal sources of worker power, such as internal or external resources from which they can draw support or strength, such as money, influence, or disruptive capacity.
4. Fourth, use the identified natural leaders to recruit an ever-widening circle of participants into the organizing effort, by tapping into their networks of influence, aiming always to win over a majority of members of the bounded constituency.
5. Fifth, conduct a series of ‘structure tests,’ such as getting a majority of members to sign a petition supporting some demand, in order to fine tune the identification of actual leaders and to gauge whether or not the support of a majority, ideally a supermajority, has been secured.
6. Sixth, once the majority or supermajority is formed, build up the confidence of members by getting them to take actions at gradually increasing levels of risk.
7. Finally, seventh, cap off the organizing project by launching a struggle — classically, a strike — that tries to impose high enough costs on an adversary that conceding to organizers’ demands becomes the only rational option.

This is the organizing model, in a nutshell. As far as it goes, I’m happy to embrace it. But whether it goes as far as McAlevey thinks it does is another matter. My concern is that it is structurally impervious to the influxes of large numbers that are typical of spontaneous protest upsurges.

Logic of Spontaneity

The word spontaneity entered the marxist lexicon by way of German idealism, deriving ultimately from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where spontaneity (Spontaneität) is contrasted with receptivity (Receptivität). In effect, spontaneity is a synonym for another term popular with German Idealists, “self-activity” (Selbsttätigkeit). Here, “spontaneous” doesn’t mean unintelligible, random, or undertaken without forethought or encouragement. The spontaneity of workers who move into struggle during sudden upsurges of protest is contrasted with the receptivity of workers who take action in the manner of following instructions from organizers. (Luxemburg, scornful of worker receptivity, compares receptivity to soldiers following marching orders, a disastrous model for the workers’ movements to emulate, in her view.)

In contrast to the receptiveness of a bounded constituency to being organized, which follows a logic of growth by addition, the spontaneity of protest upsurges follows a logic of growth by social contagion. The dynamics of this logic of social contagion can be summed up in a schematic, broadly intuitive way, in terms of four features:

1. First, social contagion is sporadic, rather than continuous and uninterrupted.
2. Second, a social contagion’s emergence is sudden, rather than gradual.
3. Third, social contagion unfolds in a relatively unforeseen, rather than in a pre-planned manner.
4. Fourth, social contagion is self-organizing, rather than orchestrated by organizers.

(It is probably worth including a warning, here, against the danger of being seduced by the organizer’s fallacy, the belief that, because a protest involving masses of people was organized, it must be the case that the cause of the mass participation in the protest was the prowess and diligence of the organizing activity itself, as if it were a unilateral achievement, like deploying pawns in a chess game, an activity in which the organizers are imagined to be unilateral protagonists. In the most extreme expressions of the organizer’s fallacy, some people suppose that they have generated a mass movement by deploying on twitter a carefully crafted #hashtag.)

It’s a familiar fact about spontaneous protest upsurges, when they follow this logic of contagious enthusiasm, that they generate, or rather consist of, dramatic influxes into movements of people, activity, and passion, and that they tend to generate broad social ferment, in the sense of expansive and high-profile public controversy and debate (over matters normally ignored or marginalized in mainstream media and official politics, like police violence or poverty or the social harmfulness of the financial industry). I shall treat it as axiomatic — in part because today I don’t have the time to substantiate this intuition with detailed arguments — that this array of features makes spontaneous upsurges a rare and precious resource with which to build social movements, on the condition that the surge of self-activity can be harnessed and integrated before it dissipates.

If so, it should count against the organizing model that it closes off movement builders from engaging in a substantial way with these influxes of people and energy. Because these upsurges happen outside of the bounded constituencies targeted by the organizing model, namely, because they originate in spatially diffuse and socially differentiated sectors of the broad working class (Marx’s “immense majority,” the “mass of the people”), rather than originating in a specific workplace or church, say, the organizing model has no way to engage with them. An upsurge like Black Lives Matter, for instance, does not allow for winning over a majority of people in the unbounded constituency, because it is indefinitely expansive; it doesn’t allow for structure tests, because there is no way to engage with everyone in the constituency; and there is no way to map the power structure of the constituency, because it is too expansive and indeterminate. The model just doesn’t apply to such scenarios.

As a result, what the model prescribes, what it celebrates and trains organizers to do, is to ignore these upsurges. That is why McAlevey is so content to be dismissive of upsurges of movement activity that most leftists regard with much more enthusiasm.

This raises the question, however: what is the alternative to the organizing model? Now, McAlevey claims that the main alternative to her model is what she calls the mobilizing model, a model that she describes in the most unflattering terms. But I will offer a different account of a model of movement-building that takes mobilization seriously, which I will call the self-mobilization model.

A Self-Mobilization Model

The model begins with an acknowledgement that, when upsurges of popular spontaneity or self-activity occur, a movement-building strategy should try to consolidate the influxes of people, energy and social ferment that these upsurges generate

It further assumes that, to consolidate and integrate these influxes, movement-building cannot restrict itself to engaging with bounded constituencies like workplaces or houses of faith, or even neighbourhoods, but must be receptive to the way people self-mobilize via assembled constituencies, which are neither permanent and spatially localized like bounded constituencies, nor indefinitely expansive like unbounded constituencies. An assembled constituency, which forms around a movement like Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park Revolt, and so on, is a temporary, spatially diffuse collectivity forged spontaneously (that is, by self-activity) through common struggle.

The model further recognizes the differentiated, pyramid-like structure of these assembled constituencies (see the pyramid graphic), which have a widest layer at the base, consisting of a pool of sympathizers, who wish the movement well, but do not try to support it actively; a somewhat narrower pool of supporters, who lend moral or material support, without actually participating in movement activities; above this, there is a narrower group, the pool of participants, who attend events and actions or public meetings, but do not engage as agitators or organizers for the movement; closer to the top of the pyramid, there is a still narrower group, the pool of agitators, people who work to create entry points into movement activity and avenues of integration into the movement, so that as many supporters and sympathizers are drawn into participation as possible; at the top of the pyramid-like structure is the pool of organizers, who try to draw agitators and participants into permanent, membership-based social movement organizations (which may or may not follow McAlevey’s model), working on the issues at the centre of the mobilization.

In light of this picture, the self-mobilization model of movement building tries, in advance of upsurges of popular spontaneity, to build movement infrastructure with graduated commitment-requirements at the entry points. By that I mean that people can be engaged at multiple levels, not only at levels that presuppose willingness to make a strong commitment, attend organizing meetings, or take on substantial risk (as in the organizing model). People are always welcome to engage, even if their commitment levels are very low. At the same time, they are also welcome to engage at high levels of commitment, too. Basically, the model prioritizes the construction and maintenance of permanent “invitations” encouraging sympathizers to become supporters, supporters to become participants, participants to become agitators, agitators to become organizers.

The model further involves creating accessible avenues of integration, at every level of engagement. This means that the movement offers flexible, differentiated forms of sustained connection with the movement, suited to multiple levels of engagement: people can join a social media network, they can subscribe to a newsletter, or get involved in a working group, or receive training in political skills, join a reading group, or — importantly, but not exclusively — they can connect with and join a membership organization working on issues related to the mobilization. The point is, though, that they do not have to go to an organizing meeting or joint a membership organization as the price of entry into the movement.

Next, the self-mobilization model (that is, agitators who embody its principles) will try to generate a sequence, ideally an escalating sequence of empowering experiences of the possibility of achieving political efficacy through collective action, allowing people to learn in practice how popular mobilization can exercise power by means of disruption, and generate social ferment and debate around issues that may have long been ignored.

Finally, a crucial, but particularly difficult part of the self-mobilization model is that it requires that, even when the sporadic upsurge dissipates, the orientation of movement receptivity toward popular spontaneity, must be maintained, and the infrastructure of movement-receptivity has to be kept alive and accessible.

* * *

This “self-organization model” is certainly less well-developed, and probably less useful and important than McAlevey’s organizing model. I am very far from wanting to make the kind of bold and emphatic claims for the self-mobilization model that she makes for the organizing model. (On the contrary, I insist on a pluralistic and flexible approach to strategy, for reasons rooted in the logic of strategic interaction very generally, not just in this case.) Even so, I do want to insist that some such alternative to organizing, which takes sudden, broad-based, decentered upsurges of popular protest activity seriously as a precious resource from which movement-building work can draw strength, vitality, and crucially, scale.

On this last point, I couldn’t agree more with McAlevey’s insistence that today’s movements suffer, above all, from a disastrous failure to establish and maintain the capacity to operate on the scale needed to threaten intransigent elites and unresponsive systems of power. Where we disagree, obviously, is that I see protest upsurges as a crucial opportunity to, as she sometimes puts it, “scale up” our movements so that we can win.