EDITORS, THE BLACK AGENDA REVIEW
Martyred Black Panther, George Jackson told us long ago that fascism has been the de facto political state of the US for some time. Today we can clearly see that both Trump and Biden are, quite simply, fascists.
The F-word – fascism – is often used to describe political moments in the past, or a political moment just beyond the current historical horizon. It describes Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, or Trujillo – or it is attached to the second coming of Donald Trump, a figure who has carefully (and successfully) cultivated his persona as an authoritarian strong-man, and who was once called the “American Hitler” by his own vice presidential candidate, the neoliberal, neo-confederate tech-honky J.D. Vance.
Yet we do not need to look to the past, or beyond the horizon, to find fascism. Fascism is currently being nurtured by Joe Biden, the doddering but cynically ruthless politician who has enabled a genocide, said nothing as protests and dissent against that genocide are brutally crushed, and overseen the expansion of corporate power and wealth, while the rest of us face an ever-tightening economic and political squeeze.
Fascism is not beyond the horizon. Fascism is here. We have only been unable to name its existence because we have long been narcotized by the ideological vapors released by a corporate-controlled media, an underfunded system of education, and our own spiritual beliefs in the myths of “democracy,” the “free market,” and the “individual.”
Above all, we have lacked the correct analysis of fascism – and we have lacked the correct analysis of combating fascism.
Which is why we are grateful for the words of George Jackson . Jackson argues that three hundred years of capitalism initiated fascism and the more recent rise of monopoly capitalism led us to the current moment of its particular articulation in “corporativism.” “I’d like to emphasize,” Jackson said, “that fascism right from the beginning – and when I say beginning, I’m going all the way back to the point where monopoly capital first started its formation – the culmination of monopoly capital was the fascist corporative.”
Before his assassination by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971, Jackson made a tape-recording outlining his understanding of fascism.The recording was played at Jackson’s memorial services and printed in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. It is a stunning document whose resonances for the present are harrowing. Jackson not only describes the uses of both co-optation and violence as strategies of fascist repression, but he allows us to understand the malleable, changing, circumstantial, and conjunctural forms fascism assumes. While its constants remain the same, it also changes shape according to, and in response to, time and place.
We can understand, then, that despite outward appearances and slight differences of rhetoric, both Trump and Biden are, quite simply, fascists, and facism has been the de facto political state of the United States (and the white west) for some time. As the corporate crooks quickly lined up behind Trump’s presidency in the wake of the assassination attempt against him, we must recognize that we are at the stage, as Jackson stated, “wherein fascism is a secured thing, corporativism.” “Can anyone look around the United States and say that this is not a corporative state?” he asked.
It is depressing –and certainly, much of the world is hurtling towards a terrible and unknown place, far worse than many of us can imagine. But Jackson leaves us with, if not hope, at least possibility– the possibility of resistance in many forms, the possibility of the reconstitution of the people’s world after this world, after this world of corporations and police and co-option and repression is completely destroyed and formed anew. Please read George Jackson’s words below.
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