Palestine and the Meaning of Global Antifascism – Developing Economics

Photo: Courtesy of the Laura Rodig Brigade, Coordinadora Feminista 8M.

What is particularly harrowing about the current situation in Gaza not only has to do with the multiplication of war crimes and with the moral and ideological bankruptcy of a Western liberal order that seeks to obfuscate, by all means – media blackouts, censorship, stigmatization, blackmail, etc. – what is already patently clear for most. The resonances with the darkest side of 20th century fascism, in particular, are a clear warning sign. In the words of Israeli intellectual Daniel Blatman: “As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the [Israeli] government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.” Also, a recent essay by Alberto Toscano draws worrying parallels between the Israeli government and fascism in its specifically Nazi variant: virulent racism with biologicist overtones; political operations driven by a totalitarian mentality; contempt for weakness and lust for violence; homophobia and anti-intellectualism.

How to position ourselves in this situation? Or more specifically, what are the consequences that arise from the act of taking a stance? In recent weeks, the war between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front has been discussed as a relevant precedent for understanding the situation in Gaza, and Frantz Fanon as an important interpreter of the Algerian struggle for decolonization and national liberation. However, it is in the foreword that Jean Paul Sartre wrote for the 1963 French edition of The Wretched of the Earth where the ethical question of taking a stance (one of the most recurrent themes in the existentialist philosophy of the time) is powerfully posed. In this text, Sartre indicts the reader for his veiled complicity with colonial violence. In an accusatory tone whose stylistic construction is clearly designed to create discomfort, the author states that not taking sides and simply remaining silent is equivalent to siding with the aggressor. I often find it difficult to write in the first person. However, under the current circumstances I cannot bear to remain silent. I am also not clear about the register in which I should write these lines; what is clear, however, is that it is imperative for me to raise my voice against the genocidal violence and systematic dehumanization to which the Palestinian people are being subjected to.

Furthermore, if the blanket of terror that the Israeli army has thrown upon Gaza makes it clear that the new century begins with a clear fascist drive, then my own process of taking a stance necessarily entails the question of what it means to be antifascist today. Because the threat of fascism is not confined to the West but seems to have increasingly become a planetary condition, it also begs the question of the scope that antifascist theory and practice ought to assume under the current historical circumstances. I do not have answers to these questions, but a potentially good starting point may be to reconnect with the Latin American traditions of socialist, feminist, and Third World internationalism that can offer relevant clues. The dehumanizing and genocidal drive that led an Israeli minister to refer to Palestinians as “human animals” is particularly well-known to the victims of reactionary violence in the region. In fact, one of the most infamous press headlines from the time of the Chilean dictatorship informs its readers that a group of political opponents had been “exterminated like mice.” José Toribio Merino, a major figure of the Chilean military junta, also referred to leftists, and especially to the members of the Communist Party, as “humanoids.” In more general terms, the rhetoric of dictatorial governments in the region usually framed monstrous representations of their opponents in which human traits were nullified.

It was during the difficult conditions of exile, persecution and even organized extermination, that Latin American intellectuals devoted themselves to reflect on the question of fascism whilst also becoming involved in initiatives for antifascist struggle and international solidarity. Quite paradoxically – and even tragically – this period led to important theoretical breakthroughs on the existing nexus between global capitalism and political authoritarianism. The book Modernization and Authoritarianism by Guillermo O’Donnell, published in 1973, is a well-known classic on the subject. In this landmark text, O’Donnell draws a link between the process of endogenous industrialization in Latin America and the construction of the technical cadres and bureaucracies that would later design and manage the repressive apparatus of authoritarian regimes – a mode of political rule that he termed bureaucratic authoritarianism. In a 1968 book titled Socialismo o fascismo [Socialism or Fascism], Brazilian sociologist Theotônio Dos Santos reconstructed the Marxian category of Bonapartism to analyze the 1964 coup against the João Goulart’s government in Brazil and the specific forms of authoritarianism that it gave rise to. At that time, Dos Santos interpreted fascism more in terms of a future threat to the region than as an already materialized reality.

It was during his second exile in Mexico, however, that Dos Santos employed the category of fascism to shed light on the nature of the authoritarian turn in the region, especially after the events that followed the 1973 coup in Chile. In an article titled “Socialism and Fascism in Latin America Today,” published in 1978 in the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Dos Santos argued that the category of fascism could not be mechanically extrapolated to the reality of Latin American dictatorial regimes. In its purest manifestation, fascism is a repressive regime of large monopoly capital that seeks to mobilize the masses to destroy the opposition, particularly under a strong ideology of irrationalism, traditionalism, and nationalism. Even though several of these elements were already present in Latin America, the oligarchy and the capitalist classes remained subordinate to foreign capital and to US imperialism. For this reason, the nationalist character of these authoritarian regimes did not have the same logical and discursive consistency of its European counterparts. This, according to Dos Santos, put them in a situation of unstable political footing, and for that reason considered that they should be more adequately conceptualized as dependent fascisms. In this text, Dos Santos also concludes that the antifascist struggle is also a struggle for socialism, and that it necessarily assumes a universal and internationalist character. In the words of Dos Santos,

…the only certainty of victory over fascism still depends on the labor movement being able to grasp the intrinsic unity of democratic and anti-imperialist tasks with socialist tasks, which are the only ones capable of ensuring the consolidation of the former.

In that same year, the Italian-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani published his book Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism, another major contribution to the literature. In this text, Germani provides an explanation about the role of mass mobilization and particularly of the middle classes as the backbone and underlying sociological foundation of totalitarian regimes. Also in 1978, the Mexican journal Cuadernos Políticos published a forum titled “The question of fascism in Latin America”, in which intellectuals from the region contributed with their perspectives on this topic. However, before Latin American thought had advanced towards theoretical characterizations of fascism and its different historical manifestations, antifascism had already established itself as a distinct political identity. More specifically, antifascism was an ethic rather than the product of a systematic theory on the social distribution of power. In fact, as the work of sociologist Ana Grondona demonstrates, Gino Germani was an antifascist militant before he became a theorist of fascism. A member of the Italian organization Giustizia e Libertà, Germani was imprisoned in 1930 for distributing antifascist political propaganda. Likewise, Marta Harnecker – a Marxist sociologist and dependency theorist – became a member of the Chilean Committee of Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in 1975 before she authored texts on dependent fascism and authoritarianism in the region.

The lesson to be drawn from this is clear: it is not necessary to await for a conceptual definition that confirms whether a certain regime or political project is fascist or not to act when some of its features become evident. In fact, many of the antifascist movements of the interwar period employed the concept of fascistization precisely to highlight that a fascist regime does not have to become materialized for political action to become organized. A notable element of Latin American antifascism, furthermore, is the fact that it also became intertwined with a strong internationalist an anti-imperialist sensibility. In this sense, the experience of the Movement for the Emancipation of Women (MEMCH) in Chile is particularly illustrative. Since its creation in 1935, the MEMCH framed itself as a feminist and antifascist movement. Furthermore, and as historian Valeria Olivares has recently argued, MEMCH’s antifascism incorporated international demands into its organizational principles, speaking out on events such as the attack of the Italian fascist army on Ethiopia, and declaring solidarity with the republican women who resisted the Franco regime in Spain.

Furthermore, the MEMCH drew a powerful link between the daily experience of gender oppression and antifascism as a universal regulative ideal. According to its programmatic documents, the MEMCH decided to oppose fascism because it was one of the greatest threats to humanity and because, in concrete terms, it tended to reduce women to the biological function of being a womb to procreate “children of the homeland”, on the one hand, and to the domestic function of care work, on the other. Since the Israeli siege on Gaza begun in October, the feminist movement in Chile has reclaimed the antifascist and internationalist legacy of the MEMCH in order to advance the cause of Palestinian liberation. Aside from organizing demonstrations to press the Chilean government to sever diplomatic ties with Israel, it has also engaged in practices of urban intervention to raise awareness of the situation. Named after one of the founders of the MEMCH, the Laura Rodig Brigade of Coordinadora Feminista 8M – a major feminist organization in Chile – placed signs in the subway stations of Santiago with the names of Palestinian women who have been murdered or taken as political prisoners. This action, it should be noted, was part of a broader framework for international solidarity named Acción Global Feminista por Palestina [Global Feminist Action for Palestine], which gathers feminist organizations from several countries in the world, most of which are from Latin America.

It is precisely in this same register, which interweaves everyday practices and events with the ebb and flow of world history, that Natasha Lennard—a Jewish intellectual committed to the Palestinian cause—reflects on what it means to live an antifascist life in our times. In her recent book Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, the author traces the biographical trajectories of some of her relatives involved in antifascist causes to question the inconsistencies of the liberal ideal of non-violence, as well as the centrist aversion to taking sides and to distinguishing the nuances between different types, motives, and scales of organized violence. Additionally, Lennard offers some clues as to what it might mean to apply these principles to our own daily lives. In her words:

We cannot simply be anti-fascist; we must also practice and make better habits, forms of life. Rather than as a noun or adjective, anti-fascist as a gerund verb: a constant effort of anti-fascisting against the fascisms that even we uphold. Working to create nonhierarchical ways of living, working to undo our own privileges and desires for power. The individualized and detached Self, the over-codings of family-unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism – all of them paranoiac sites of micro-fascism in need of anti-fascist care.

There is no intrinsic paradox in forging an antifascist identity that is underpinned by small daily practices and which at the same time aspires to the emancipation of humanity as a whole. Dialectical thinking reminds us that reality is an organic unity whose constitutive elements are internally differentiated. This means that the particular and the universal are interconnected in a dynamic of mutual transformation; It also means that the struggles of the past are intertwined with those of the present, and those of others with ours. The pain of the Palestinian people is also the pain of thousands of Latin Americans who, for decades, have had to mourn their relatives who disappeared or were murdered by the armored violence of dependent fascisms. Antifascism is but the last line of defense to protect that which is most valuable of what it means to be human: recognition of the dignity of others regardless of their origin, creed, gender, capabilities, sexual orientation, or skin color. Remembering and honoring those who became committed to this ideal is to cast a ray of light in times of darkness and to redefine what it means to be free.

* This text is a revised and updated version of an article previously published in Spanish by Jacobin América Latina.

Martín Arboleda is Assistant Professor at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.

* This text is a revised and updated version of an article previously published in Spanish by Jacobin América Latina.