Paul Mason: History, Ideology & Resistance to Fascism

Connect with the movement at RefuseFascism.org and support:

Venmo: @Refuse-Fascism
Cashapp: @RefuseFascism
Paypal: paypal.me/refusefascism
Web: donate.refusefascism.org

Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Transcript:

episode72
Sun, 8/15 1:51PM • 58:03

Paul Mason 00:00

What we can do, and what we need to do, is proudly claim and defend the intellectual space of anti-fascism… Go to the streets and form grassroots bodies explicitly there to create new forms of activism… The only way you stop fascism is by creating a living, breathing alternative. Gotta create the living, breathing alternative in the form of an anti-fascist ethos… One person taking a series of anti-fascist actions, forces other people to make decisions about what they’re going to do about fascism.

Sam Goldman 00:50

Welcome to Episode 72 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. I’m glad to be back after a week off. Thanks again to Coco Das for guest-hosting last week. If you haven’t listened to Episode 71, Death March of White Supremacy, which features a chat I recently had with Wajahat Ali, go and give it a listen, of course, after you finish this episode. Today, we’re sharing an interview with Paul Mason, author of ‘How to Stop Fascism’.

But first, let’s talk about some developments from this week as they relate to the continued fascist threat. On July 27, Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn testified before the House Select Committee investigating January 6. Regarding stark differences between the coup attempt and past protest was that these fascists were “emboldened by people in power,” that “they have marching orders.” But that didn’t start January 6. Arguably it started four years ago, August 11, in Charlottesville, and now just yesterday, four years later, Proud Boys joined fascist anti-vaxxers and Recall [Governor Gavin} Newsome, fascists through downtown LA, savagely beating journalists and those who oppose them, exalting the right to kill, and it isn’t even wasn’t even a major news story. Mary Trump, in her article this week published in New Republic wrote, “The Republicans haven’t lost their way. They have instead found it and it’s led them straight toward unabashed white supremacy and fascism.” The Republi-fascist response to COVID, which is surging as the Delta variant spreads mostly among the unvaccinated, is highly illustrative of this point, and its genocidal consequences. Children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US hit a record number this week, and Texas takes its ban on school mass mandates to the Supreme Court.

Here is Sunsara Taylor, co-host of the RNL show and co-initiator of Refuse Fascism, with commentary on this fascist pandemic. It aired this past Thursday, on the RNL show on YouTube.

Sunsara Taylor 03:17

Here, I want to make three points. First, this Covid 19 pandemic is a fascist pandemic. From the second this pandemic was known, that bloated bag of fascist feces Donald Trump and his whole fanatical fascist movement inside and outside of government has attacked and denied basic science. They held armed rallies and threatened state officials for taking measures to mitigate the spread. They pushed lunatic lies that the disease would just disappear on its own and dangerous drugs and crazy cures like drinking bleach and light beams.

Donald Trump 03:54

Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet, or just very powerful light.

Sunsara Taylor 04:00

They drown people in misinformation and wild racist conspiracy theories and unleash their foot soldiers to not only refuse to wear masks, but to violently attack those who ask them to. Then, finally, due to the extraordinary efforts of scientists and healthcare workers the world over, we got vaccines that were proven to be safe, proven to save lives, proven to put the brakes on the spread of this deadly pandemic. But still, to this day, these fascist lunatics are defending the right to refuse to get the vaccine or to wear a mask as a matter of their selfish, individualistic freedom; the freedom to do whatever the hell they want, no matter who it endangers or kills. The fascist governors of Texas and Florida, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have even used the power of the state to bar and punish local governments, businesses or schools from trying to institute mask mandates within their institutions or their areas. And just like everything else about these fascists, all of this has white supremacy, misogyny – that is the hatred of women – and xenophobia woven into it and pulsing through it. It is Black people, Native people and Latinos. It is immigrants locked in detention and people locked in the prisons. It is the essential workers in the grocery stores and the Amazon warehouses, in the meatpacking plants. It is these people who have been among the hardest hit by this pandemic and suffered the greatest loss of life. And these fascists know this. Rand Paul, that sitting GOP senator knows this when he gets out there and calls on people to defy mask mandates, including breaking the law and doing so saying “they can’t arrest us all”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene 04:31

“Yeah, well, what they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we?”

Rand Paul 05:06

“It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us.”

Sunsara Taylor 05:06

Marjorie Taylor Greene, that lunatic Q-anon white supremacist conspiracy theorist anti-Semitic sitting Congress person knows this when she gets a crowd cheering because Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, and then suggests that people use their “Second Amendment rights” against anybody who dares to show up at their door just to disseminate scientific information about the safety and value of this vaccine. Yes, this is a fascist pandemic. And we should use that term with everyone, including those people who think they’re hip or daring by calling it a scamdemic or plandemic. No, it is a fascist pandemic. Point 2: Everything I’ve been describing has been fueled and shaped by, but it’s also feeding into, and intensifying the rare time we are in, when revolution becomes possible. Bob Avakian in his piece, This is a Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible notes, “the basic reason why this is so is that there is a huge fight among the ruling powers in this country now between the fascist Republicans and the Democrats and huge divisions in this country as a whole.” But more than that, he states, these divisions among the ruling powers, and in the larger society cannot be resolved within the framework that has existed and which has held things together for nearly 150 years since shortly after the end of the Civil War, which led to the abolition of slavery. They cannot be resolved on the basis of the capitalist democracy that has been the normal means of capitalist rule dictatorship for so long.

These divisions run through every single major issue that confronts society and ends up making all of them significantly more intense, from the pandemic to global warming to the refugee crisis that has made measurably worse by the climate crisis to how to understand and educate the youth about the history of this country. This leads to what Bob Avakian described in his piece The Deadly Illusion of Normalcy and the Revolutionary Way Forward as “cascading crises in which each crisis is subsumed in and amplified by this overall division.” The Declaration and Call states, “The crisis and deep divisions in society now can only be resolved through radical means of one kind or another, either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

Point 3: Everyone who possibly can should get the vaccine. The RNL show has been out in the streets interviewing people about COVID-19 and the vaccine, and we’ve encountered an incredible amount of ignorance, conspiracy theories and hesitation about the vaccine, including hesitation among people who have a correct distrust of the system, but a very incorrect distrust of the scientific method. We’ve also encountered many people who have gotten the vaccine, including many who have a pretty good scientific understanding about why it is safe, and why we all have a responsibility to each other to get this vaccine. In future episodes, we’re going to be sharing some of this footage with you. And we’re going to bring back Dr. Phil Rice, who has been a previous guest on this show, to help bring scientifically grounded answers and clarity to some of the confusion that we’ve encountered and that’s circulating. But here today, I want to close out this commentary by speaking very directly to everyone who is not themselves a fascist, but who is still resisting taking this vaccine and other health measures. Really think about this. At a time when it is actually possible to dramatically decrease the damage being done by this global pandemic, damage that is disproportionately hitting and killing Black people, Latinos and Native Americans. Do you really want to be finding yourself in the same camp as these lunatic anti scientific fascists? Do you really want to be bedfellows with these genocidal racists in their crusade against the vaccine and other health measures? No, get the vaccine and struggle for everybody around you to get the vaccine too.

Sam Goldman 10:18

A link to the episode on YouTube is in the show notes. Let’s pause to note one of the primary forces accelerating the development of the fascist movement, which has been in the news this week: the US war on Afghanistan, which is said to be ending as troops withdrawal from the provinces and ultimately from Kabul. This war, which looks likely to continue in the form of some level of drone bombings and airstrikes, has, in fact, helped set the stage for the rise of fascism in the US. For some time now, it’s claimed the dubious honor of being the longest war in US history — a history marked by many, many wars. The world’s most powerful country in terms of military power has sunk massive resources in the occupation of Afghanistan for decades now. A gambit that Bush, Cheney and company hoped would lead to a clear and quick U.S. domination over the region and beyond, that Obama rejiggered to rely predominantly on remote piloted drone attacks, while still killing mostly civilians, and that Trump ultimately called quits to, but not before dropping the quote unquote mother of all bombs on the country and dramatically escalating airstrikes killing thousands of civilians. Now, as Biden carries out the deal Trump made with the Taliban, this story has shot up to the top of the headlines. We’ll have more to say about it. And we’ll carry conversations about the topic with experts soon.

But for now, I want to leave you with this: The rise of fascism in the U.S. has everything to do with the role that the U.S. plays in the world, and the destabilizing effects of the so called war on terror, with its boomerang effects onto us society. It is for the sake of people everywhere, in the name of humanity, we must refuse fascism here. And we will do no one any favors by sugarcoating or denying the history of how we got here from Iraq, to Afghanistan to Vietnam and Hiroshima to the genocide and slavery that the U.S. was founded upon. How do we understand what’s afoot with the fascist threat? And how do we sound the alarm? That’s the topic I discussed with palm ease and in our conversation a few weeks ago, have a listen. RefuseFascism.org unites with people from diverse perspectives to sound the alarm and prevent the consolidation of this American fascism. Through our website, podcasts, social media and publications, we engage dialogue and debate with a broad array of writers, scholars, legal experts, and people from different walks of life, to educate people on the roots nature trajectory of the real and present danger of fascism. And through our engagement, and networking with people and social movements, we are forging understanding and relationships aimed at preventing the consolidation of fascism.

It’s with that in mind that I’m happy to be chatting today with Paul Mason, journalist, filmmaker and author of ‘How to stop fascism: history, ideology, resistance’, which is now available for pre order. Now, Paul, and I have some big differences to start with. Paul doesn’t think Trump or the GOP are fascists, nor does he see Bolsinaro in Brazil or Modi and India as one. So why am I chatting with him on a Refuse Fascism podcast? Well, Paul does see a big danger in fascism consolidating in major democracies, and is working hard to explore what I see as essential questions. And like myself, he is committed to using this window of time to transform people’s understanding so that we can respond commensurately to the threat. In his intro of his new book, he writes: “Fascism is back, but of its own accord, something else got here first, but what, and what can we do about it?” With that, I’m excited to welcome Paul. Welcome, Paul. Thanks for joining us.

Paul Mason 13:18

Hi, Sam. It’s great to be with you.

Sam Goldman 14:15

I wanted to start with the big news. Today, the January 6, house commission probe began and I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any thoughts if you have on its significance and what implications you see here.

Paul Mason 14:29

Thanks for that introduction. And I should make clear that one of the big themes in this book is that neither the academic nor the orthodox Marxist left definitions of fascism, I think, hold good anymore. Indeed, we spent in political science 30 or 40 years trying to distinguish right wing populism from fascism, and right wing populism, indeed, from authoritarian, mainstream conservatism. The theory was, certainly in my country, {UK – editors] that if you had an electorally focused right wing populist — we had a party called UKIP led by Nigel Farage, some of your listeners will have heard of him. If you have that, then people of a kind of misogynist, violent racist mindset would at least not go to the full fascist offer. Right wing populism, even in the form of Trump, was seen as a kind of firewall, which would stop fascism. But Hello, January the sixth shows that the firewall is on fire.

The theme of my book is that the finely crafted definitions of academia about what fascism is, what right wing populism is, and indeed, what conservatism is, the boundaries are bleeding, and January the sixth showed that. We will obviously not want to preempt this House investigation. Of course, problem with the House investigation is that it’s going to be hamstrung by essentially non-participation of the Republicans. But we already know from the indictments that we’re looking at conspiracy, that we are looking at insurrection-ism, and that is, primarily, it appears, among the people I would believe fit into any academic definition of fascism. We’re talking the Proud Boys, we’re talking about the Oathkeepers, we’re talking about the Three Percenters or the well organized white supremacists who have been either members of the law enforcement or even military. They were very clearly there. What’s the problem? Trump incited them.

You know, the incitement came from somebody who technically falls into the category for me as a right wing populist. Right wing populists — here in in Europe, European Union. European Commission even has a website dedicated to monitoring the far right — the actual definition of the European government of a right wing populist is that they don’t call insurrections. Yet Trump incited one. Whether you read the various books there, the Michael Wolff book, we don’t know what was in Trump’s head. I’m not sure I trust any of these accounts yet. But, what I would like the House committee to get its teeth into, of course into the insurrectionary and conspiratorial, violent armed militia activity, it needs to be pulled away from that part of law enforcement that deals with terrorism and dealt with as fascism. Terrorism isn’t the same as fascism. But the next thing is, to understand this radicalization process. If we look at Ashley bobbitt, she’s the horse vessel now of American fascism. She wasn’t in that sense, a deeply rooted fascist activist. She falls into the category of the radicalized MAGA people, the radicalized Make America Great, Trump Republicans, and their speed of movement was fast. I believe QAnon is the thing that gave those people a rapid movement. And we need to understand where they are. Because when we come to join the historical parallels, it’s what happens to them — there maybe only 10s of 1000s of Proud Boys and militia people. There are millions of radicalized Republicans. We need to stop them becoming fascist.

Sam Goldman 17:55

Thank you for that, Paul. I really appreciate that clarification and those comparisons. We’ve been trying to pay more attention on our show on QAnon. I want to discuss a really important part that I found in your book. The major theme throughout your book that you write that fascism, “is a recurrent symptom of system failure under capitalism, and the critical failure, fascism relies on is ideological.” I thought that when comparing with so many others that I’ve read who write about fascism, the centrality that you put both on its root in the system of capitalism, but also the centrality of ideology, both of those are unique. So if you could walk a little bit through how do you see that and maybe more importantly, how did you get there?

Paul Mason 18:45

My background is Trotskyism. My deep background, you know, as a young man, aged 18, the British left was Trotskyist, I was a Trotskyist activist. One of the first things I did was take part in a movement called the Anti-Nazi League, because we had an upsurge of fascist activity in the United Kingdom in the late 70s. I mean, I would call myself a Marxist or have a fairly heterodox nature. But more or less from then onwards, we operated with a definition of fascism that went like this: First of all, we’re dealing with the tribute band in the form of the National Front in Britain. They were a tribute band to Nazism. They marched with the union jack, oh, a national flag, but in secret, they sat with Nazi armbands and they sang Nazi songs, and they were very into the Norse mythology of Nazism. Okay, so you’re dealing with a tribute band of something of a band that’s gone out of business. So that’s easy to deal with. You just confront them on the streets. There’s not that many of them, you mobilize minority communities — there’s a lot of them. If people get the chance in the United States, there was a great recent BBC documentary called Uprising, explaining how the radicalization of Black people in the area of London where I live, South London, led from an anti-fascist mobilization to protest against police indifference to racist killings, to indeed a major Europe rising, the Brixton riots.

So what we were doing wasn’t a kind of separate thing that was like you’re sort of obsessively kind of monitoring and mobilizing just against fascists. It was part of a wider movement of minorities. The ideas in my head at the time were this. And it was taught to me by people who indeed, you know, been in the Second World War and indeed in the Spanish Civil War. So there was a continuity here to the pre-war working class movement. Fascism arises when there’s a threat of revolution, its job is to destroy the working class organization, it mobilizes squads to do it. That’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with. I now think that the missing bit of that was the understanding of the deep psychological disturbance, primarily in the European middle class, that underpinned this that was deeper than simply fear of revolution. Of course, there was fear of revolution, the famous article Panic in Mittelstand, Panic in the Middle Class, written by German Social Democrats in the early 30s, tried to understand what’s going on.

For me, the most important contribution to that debate, which was largely ignored by the orthodox Marxist left, was the contribution of Wilhelm Reich and Eric Frum, two Freudian Marxist psychologists who said: Look, this is not just about fear of working class revolution, it’s not just that a section of the financial bourgeoisie decided to hire Mussolini, to hire Hitler to be the kind of street operatives. What we’re dealing with here say Reich and Frum is a fear of freedom. And this fear of freedom is more deeply rooted in class society, than it is just industrial capitalism. Reich locates it in the subconscious. He locates it in the family, in the nation. And these things, the family and the nation, and indeed, racial consciousness, ethnic consciousness, for example, of Germanic people are more deeply rooted than industrial capitalism. So it’s that that I’m trying to bring in a way, all that needs to be done with Reich and Frum is to extract them from some of the baggage they brought. Reich went crazy, you know, he had a weird theory of the orgasm. But the work Reich did in Weimar Germany, inside the German Communist Party, was very valuable, because he said to the German communist loop, stop reading out unemployed figures to unemployed people. Start understanding the that when Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist makes a speech telling them that their mother Germany has been whipped across the face by Jews, understand the subconscious, the sexuality, the whole depth of fear that that rhetoric is playing on. He understood that; the German communists didn’t. They didn’t want to hear that aspect of what I think is the fully rounded Marxist understanding of fascism.

Sam Goldman 22:51

Thanks for that. I think my understanding, not as a historian, but just as a person who reads was it’s reduced in some way to like accelerationism or something, which I don’t think is that correct characterization, but was the after them us. Somehow that was going to create an opportunity as if it wasn’t going to annihilate them in the process. And the ‘they’ that I’m referring to, sorry, I wasn’t clear, was the German communists. Yeah. Would you say that? That was part of it?

Paul Mason 23:20

Yes, it certainly was. But then, in fact, in my book, I quote from Daniel Guerin, the French anarchist who toured the Weimar Republic in its last days, toured the youth hostels. In one end of the youth hostel common room is the Nazi youth, in the other end is the Communist Party youth. They trade insults, they sing different songs. After dark, one communist says, “You know what the problem is, we actually want the same things. We want the overthrow of capitalism and a new world.” And the Nazis and the communists were fishing in the same pond of young unemployed people, but the political mistakes of the KPD, the German communists, I think, go deeper than that. The first problem with the KPD was its catastrophism. It believed that capitalism was about to collapse. Of course, the Wall Street crash was underway, capitalism was collapsing, but they could see no downside to it.

The second thing is the absolute refusal to make alliances with social democratic and later liberal parties in defense of democracy. They did stupid things like in one part of Germany, Prussia — it was like a state the equivalent of a US state but a big one. One part of Germany, Prussia was ruled by the Social Democrats, and the communists continually tried to overthrow that government in alliance with Nazis. They would call referendums jointly with the Nazis. The communists weren’t wrong on one thing, they were absolutely right on one thing you need to resist austerity, you need to resist job cuts, wage cuts. To do it, you may have to break the international order, because to do it, you would have to stop paying reparations to the Allies. Whose demand was that? The Nazis. So in a way, that tragedy, I think, was avoidable.

The real problem was the failure to learn lessons from it fast enough and equally culpable were — probably more culpable — were the social democrats. In a way they ended up in a situation where neither party, neither the social democrats nor the communists in Germany, had fired a shot by the time their parties were dissolved, and their leaders were jailed by the Nazis. I do think there are important lessons from this for now. It’s not only as it were, I think large parts the American left are very reluctant to make any kind of tactical unity in action with the liberal and social democratic workers; trade unionists, Democrats, etc. We’re gonna have to do it. Because as we saw in the November 2020, election, Trump added 10 million voters to his constituency, including working class people. Faced with that I would have voted Biden. And I think that if the question is having voted for Biden, what do you get? What kind of space do you create in American society to be able to do anti fascist activity and propaganda?

Sam Goldman 25:57

So I think what you were laying out just now is really important and people listening know I voted for Biden, I voted for the first time, to be honest, and I’m glad I did. And it was important that Trump was delivered an electoral defeat. And now the question is, what are we going to do now? And what is that going to mean? I think that this victory has only bought us time. The fascist social base has actually become more entrenched, as Paul was talking about. It’s grown, but it’s also become hardened through the January 6 coup and this toxic stew, if you will, of the big lie. I wanted to shift towards what you see these 21st century fascists going. What does their winning look like?

Paul Mason 26:41

I think I should say as well that all of the forces we’re dealing with in the United States are in motion. They’re in a process of change. For example, I would have said, at the start of the Trump administration, I would have characterized Trump, Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, as right wing populists. When both Bannon and Flynn ended up the wrong side of the law, indicted and in one case convicted, what we then see when Bannon and Flynn are out of office, is that they both gravitate towards the fascist agenda. Bannon clearly in his meetings with the various traditionalist thinkers, Alexander Dougan, he’s in that world of traditionalism. Maybe we can talk about traditionalism. Flynn moves very clearly to become a figurehead of, he wanted the military coup in the famous meeting of, I think it was 18 December in the White House, but he’s also a cult figure in the QAnon movement. So it’s quite possible for individual formations within right wing populism to move in a fascist direction.

In my book, why I place so much importance on ideology, is that what I think we’re seeing…Let’s use a concrete example: 10 years ago, if you met a racist football fan in the United Kingdom, what do they believe? They hate migrants. They think they’re migrants, food smells funny. They don’t like their customs. They don’t like women in hijabs. They want their country back. They think migrants steal their jobs, and they’re not brilliantly impressed with feminism, but they’re not really agitated about feminism. Today, you meet them, and what’s first thing they say? Marxism. So when somebody with a neck tattoo is worried about Marxism, that’s really unusual. They’ve been educated. They’ve been indoctrinated. They think masks and vaccines are Marxist. They think feminism and migration is destroying the white race. So what’s that? That’s the great replacement theory. What has happened is a process I call backfilling: You build a wall, and then you fill behind it with rubble to strengthen it. And what’s happened with them is that the fascist thought architecture has invaded their brains. Now, I think that’s very true of the movement behind Trump.

Therefore, what we can do. And what we need to do is proudly claim and defend the intellectual space of anti-fascism. In my book, I describe the way Mussolini more or less created the anti-fascist threat. As long as there was no anti-fascist movement against him, he never used the word anti-fascist. One guy, his name was Argo Secondari, a middle class war veteran, set up a non leftist, i.e. non-communist, anti-fascist movement called the Arditi del Popolo. And as soon as he did that, Mussolini looked at it and he said: Okay, I can now tar the whole of liberalism with the brush of association with this guy. And so Mussolini starts to talk about the threat of a violent anti-fascist government exactly in the same way as Trump did. So now, what did the left need to do and what do we need to do today? You reclaim anti-fascism as a positive and virtuous goal.

My book is called ‘How to Stop Fascism.’ I know if I go into certain pubs in certain parts of London, it’d be hard to get that book out because people go “Well oh, good so you’re antifa, yeah?” We call antifa in Europe is called anti-FA. Okay, but I’m going to do it. And I think we need to reclaim that space. The second thing is pre-bunking. So we know what debunking is. It’s saying like all this bullshit in your head is wrong. But pre-bonking is getting politicians to go on the air and say: “Look, I want to talk to you about the great replacement theory. Here’s what it is: It’s the white genocide theory. The theory that feminism and migration is destroying the white race. It’s rubbish. And I want you, the parents and the teachers to go into schools. And to see it’s rubbish.” We see liberals here in the UK, also in France, just the same as in the USA, run away from that task. So they’re going: “Let’s not talk about them because Trump was defeated. So let’s just ignore all that.” We can’t do that. The ideological battle is really important. But of course, what’s the problem? I’m sure your listeners will understand this: Since the collapse of the neoliberal economic model, which I date to 2008, neoliberalism, or other liberalism in the West, has been really incoherent. It’s not confident. We don’t have a competent liberalism in Europe. We don’t have a competent liberalism. I think, in the United States, it’s left to people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or Rashida Talib, who are not liberals, to just actually defend the liberal values.

Sam Goldman 31:05

I think that the centrality of people’s understanding is something that is extremely important in your book that readers will walk away with. I wanted to talk about this idea of unity. And the idea of different forces uniting to overcome fascism. It was something that Refuse Fascism had, since 2016, been working to bring about and we did, in many ways, unite people from very different perspectives. But the millions didn’t come into the streets, plant themselves and drive out this regime. And I think we wouldn’t be in a very different situation today, had that happened. You mentioned that the forces that ended up coming together to fight Hitler, I believe, is what you referenced in the book. I’m wondering if you can talk about any thoughts you have on the basis or terms of such unity. For instance, if Stalin had subordinated to the US and Britain, my ancestors would all killed. So what are your thoughts on the basis in terms of such unity? To be clear, again, I think that it’s going to take bold unity, but I also think that it’s going to take revolution to fundamentally do away with the impetus towards fascism.

Paul Mason 32:21

I would put it differently. I certainly think that a zero carbon world will have to be an anti-capitalist world. Whatever we, Marxists or the left bring with our desire for anti- capitalism, suppressing the market has just got to be a fact of the mid century if we’re going to defeat climate change. In other words, that is still the agenda that I see as the main thing. It’s just that getting there, we’re gonna have to defeat fascism. How do we do that? The lessons for me are best drawn from the French Popular Front. Now, as soon as I say that, I hear popular fronts are a disaster. They don’t work. They’re a cross class alliance that involves betraying the working class. Well, yeah, that happens, certainly in Spain. But it’s also a fact that without the Popular Front, governments of both the Spanish government in 1936, and the French government in 1936, there would have been no Spanish Civil War to take place. The Spanish Civil War would have taken place with the fascists already in power, let’s put it that way. And we know what happened because we have a trial run of it in 1934, where the left just gets smashed. In France, fascism, only triumphed because Germany invaded and set up the Vichy regime. Of course, it used elements of fascist movements that were already there, but those movements had their military wings had been illegalized in 1936, by the Popular Front government. So the Popular Front did something.

Most importantly, they did two things that they’re not often celebrated for by the orthodox left — well, they did three things: The first thing is they formed overt written agreements between political forces. Now, we know that Sanders and Biden effectively did a kind of deal before the election. But that deal wasn’t done in front of the masses on paper in a meeting with a written agenda. It was in France. In France, the radical party, which was a bit like the kind of Clinton wing of the Democrats, and the Social Democrats, which I would say is a bit like Biden, and the Communists, which is a bit like a much wider American left than exists. They sat in a room, under pressure of their members, and they signed an agreement. Now, the Communists signed away a lot of their programs. Let’s make no mistake about it. And we may say: “Well, they agreed to sing the national anthem. They agreed to vote for the defense budget. They agreed to wave the national flag. What does that cost you?” They did a lot more than that. They signed away their anti imperialist program. Up to then the communists have been in favor of liberating Algeria, Tunisia, New Caledonia, and the Pacific. They dropped that completely — Martinique. They did it because they realized that they were gonna get smashed in a fascist state if they didn’t do it.

So, having proper negotiations, public negotiations and agreements: number one. Number two, by doing this, by creating a left government, they then open up a space for mass action. Anybody who studies the popular front government in France 1936 knows that it sold out a mass strike movement. But the mass strike movement took place because suddenly there was social space for that to take place. So far, six months into the Biden administration, there’s a mass anti racist movement, for sure. But I’m not seeing a mass advance by the American proletariat, or the salariat, let’s call it, that hasn’t taken place. Third thing that the French Popular Front did: From its inception, it was a grassroots movement. Now in the Democrats, above all, in those grassroots organizations that surrounded the Biden campaign — you do have some grassroots and of course, in Black Lives Matter in Me Too, you have big grassroots bodies. But what happened in France, and weirdly, it was through an organization called the vigilance committee of intellectuals, which shows absolutely ridiculous. But it was the local branches have this vigilance committee, set up in every town, allowed the masses to bypass the party branch structures of the three communist socialist liberal traditions. They created a cultural movement, almost a network type movement, that was really important in taking people to the streets.

If we distill those lessons into three things, it is: 1) Force the politicians to actually haggle in front of your eyes, not in secret. 2) Go to the streets and win stuff. When you’ve got a Liberal government like you’ve got in the United States. Right now, you’ve got two years until Congress effectively shuts down because, you know, Trump is coming back. Voter suppression is underway, of course, most of the American Midwest and South. So go to the streets now. 3) Create a mass cultural movement that really does actually reach out. I would say that reaches out as deeply into the — you know, I forgotten the name of that congressional candidate in West Virginia. It’s a working class guy who’s self described as a red [??? – is this Richard Ojeda?] of guy… Him, his people, and their supporters…Make the advances no into the grass roots of republicanism.

Because there’s a great complaint among the American left, which was all the money spent on to the Lincoln project, which was wasted because there were no moderate Republicans. That’s probably true, but there are Republicans, Republican voters, and indeed non voters, in those Midwestern and southern states, who I think can be mobilized by a radical plebeian movement that are not being reached either by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who, after all, is is in New York City candidate, or Rashida Tlaib, who, after all, is Chicago [ed correction: Detroit]. We need to be able to use this moment to reach for example, all those Hispanic communities in the Rio Grande Valley, who voted Trump. Many Hispanic communities in places like Texas, beyond the Rio Grande that voted for Trump. There is a constituency that mobilized and I think that’s the three lessons of the Popular Front: Negotiate, sign agreements, go to the streets, and form grassroots bodies explicitly there to create new forms of activism. And then don’t make the mistake the popular front did, which is then six months in, they said: “Shit, everybody, we’ve got to pause. This is going to radical.” The liberals said: “We’ve got to stop, we can’t hold this together.” At that point, that’s when if you’ve developed the self confidence, the left has to say: “We’re not stopping, we’re actually advancing.” Even if it means the popular front then falls apart. The fact remains the only time fascism was defeated, other than by the Soviet Union was by — temporarily — by popular frontist strategy, led by the left. That wouldn’t have happened without the communists.

Sam Goldman 38:27

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I think we could have a whole separate conversation, and I would love to do it. I’d love to do like a roundtable on this working class inter-collaboration. I think it would be a really interesting conversation. I’m not going to go there in this interview, especially in my response. I do want to say that I do think that there is a large section of people, and they’re who I’m very concerned about, who were deeply concerned about the Trump years, and who do not want to see fascism. Who maybe took to the streets once or twice during the Trump years, but did not see themselves as essential. Who subordinated their role to the role of a Democratic Party proxy members. I think that is a population of millions who I think really do need to heed your warning about the threat, and, in my opinion, break with some of the individualism and parasitism that kept them out of the streets. So that’s kind of how I see it. One of the things that you say in your book, you repeated it in several chapters really effectively, and I thought it was very provocative, was that, “Fascism is the fear of freedom, triggered by a glimpse of freedom.” I was wondering if you could just share why do you see that as an essential understanding?

Paul Mason 39:49

It’s an insight that is at the center of Wilhelm Reich and Eric Frum’s theories of fascism. The fear of freedom they speak about is not simply created by working In a factory, being exploited by, a boss. It’s almost a kind of fundamental human thing that because humans have lived in hierarchical societies for 40,000 years. As a journalist working for the mainstream media, I covered the 2011 uprisings starting with a student uprising, indeed, in London in 2010, followed by the Arab Spring, followed by the Occupy Wall Street events, and then, you know, on to the Brazil, Ukraine, Turkey, 2013 uprisings. Because they were so brief, and because they were revolutions in which almost there was no Bolshevik Party…So 1905, you had the Bolshevik Party in the Jewish Bund. They were able to say: “Okay, this is what just happened. We have a theoretical accounting process about what happened, what failed.” Leon Trotsky’s book ‘Results and Prospects’ is exactly a kind of attempt to do that on the 1905 revolution.

But because the forces that made the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, were not so theoretical, I tried — in a book called ‘Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’ — in England, ‘kicking off’ means the start of a fight. In ‘Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’, I tried to say: “Look, what just happened is an amazing thing.” I think it was much more radical. It was a much more profound challenge to the power of the financial elite than the people doing it imagined. So we would saw the failure of those movements. We saw them atomized. We saw them easily defeated by repression. The ruling financial elite of the world didn’t just go away and say: “Oh, well, yeah, that happened. Let’s move on.” They studied it. They responded to it. First of all, I think they responded to it…I’ve now concluded that they responded to the power of the masses using the internet by coming up with the project of disinformation. Whether it’s from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, whether it’s from Xi Jinping’s China, whether it’s from the CIA, whether it’s from the fascists themselves, disinformation is the number one tactic of the authoritarians and the right. And here’s why: Because, we had in the early social media and in the internet, a machine for spreading hope, and what is now, it’s a big machine for spreading hate. It’s a monopolized machine for algorithmically targeting people with hate speech and disinformation. That’s not an accident. It’s because the elite decided to do it. Because they understood information theory 101. What’s the best way to screw up an information network is to flood it with noise. That’s how you take down a telephone exchange, flood it with noise.

I saw in those 2011 to 2013 uprisings, a glimpse of freedom. Because the significance of them was, rather in the way the 1905 revolution was the first example of the general strike in a revolutionary general strike…You know, Rosa Luxemburg is there in Poland, she’s writing the pamphlet, the general strike. She realizes this thing that the masses have invented, plus the Soviet, they’re a new thing. They are Whoa, capitalism dies. Now, I think we actually saw another example of how capitalism dies in 2011, 2013. It’s not the orthodox Marxist version of revolution, but simply millions of people saying: “I don’t want to live like this. I want to live in a way that I set the agenda. And by the way, I’m setting my tent in the capital city of my country in the main square, and in that tent camp, we will begin to live as we want to live without money without alienation.” I think the elite of the world saw that and they said “Shit, that is how capitalism is going to end.” And Ernst Nolte, the reactionary conservative historian of German fascism, came up with a very interesting insight. He said there are always people in bourgeois society who hate freedom; military people, police people, hierarchical people, people whose entire careers depend on fanatical evangelical religions, for example. They cluster around the project of defeating freedom, or what ends Enzo Traverso, the living Italian historian, calls “the revolution against the revolution.”

I think we’re living through a mass fear of freedom. If you look at that, crowd on the sixth of January, the radicalized Trump Brigade, the Ashli Babitt type person is a person radicalized by a fear of imminent freedoms. And what does it mean? That feminism, that transgender rights, that Black people are really going to be able to be stopped for a traffic offence and drive away having a ticket, not a hole in their head. That freedom scares them, and they mobilized. So we have to understand we’re not dealing just with a kind of economic force. I think the mistake of the generation of leftists a Marxists that I grew up with was to see everything through pure economics. The Marxists of the 1930s didn’t even believe in the subconscious. When the Freudians said to them: “Look, Nazism is playing on the sexual urges, the sexual repression of German people, their subconscious, the KPD leadership said: “Don’t talk about this, talk about the class struggle.” And Reich said “No, that is the class struggle. Sexual freedom is the class struggle.” This is what Reich did: He went to women, many of them supporters of Christian or even the Nazi parties; Christian conservative or Nazi parties. He said: “You want to know about birth control? Do you want to know about contraception and abortion?” And it worked. They had their greatest successes. Unorganized workplaces, the so called Sex-Pol movement, The left doesn’t want to talk about the Sex-Pol movement, because it’s embarrassing. But it was an amazing movement of 40,000 German working class people who were anti fascist, and we’re using sex education and youth social work to fight that fight that the politics wasn’t doing.

Sam Goldman 45:14

One of the things that I found a lot of unity with in your writing, and it’s something that’s consistent in things that I’ve read from you that weren’t in this book, is that if you don’t understand what you’re up against, you can’t fight it. And so I appreciated your telling of your personal journey that you were on as someone who was in a situation where: Yeah, you punch a Nazi in the face, to confronting a situation where you’re not gonna punch your way out of this. And the reason why you were able to recognize that came from you understanding what you were up against. And in your book you wrote, “The lesson should be to defeat fascism, you have to win the battle of ideas, and well in advance of its electoral breakthrough.” And, that none of this is preordained, that the Nazis could have been stopped, that fascism can be stopped, these things aren’t destined, but they have to do with changing the way that people think of the world.

One of the things that I was surprised by, honestly, in your book, is that — you were covering a lot of ground, so I understand what it was anything that, and this isn’t a criticism, just an observation was that — the growth of religious fundamentalism and its role, and I think you characterized it as irrationalism, wasn’t more a part of the story. I think that from what I’ve read about QAnon is one of the reasons why it’s spread to be as large as some major religions in the US, the numbers are based on, is because it operates on a lot of the ideas that are part of, let’s say, evangelicalism and Catholicism, both of them. So I think that, in my opinion, when we’re talking about the battle of ideas, part of it to me is this battle against, in this country, Christian fundamentalism, or as I call Christian fascism. And I know it’s, it’s different in other parts of the world, but I feel like there’s, at least in Hungary and other places, that is the driving force in the shifting away. I just was wondering what your thoughts were.

Paul Mason 47:08

In general, there is a set of theories about fascism that I’ll call “political religion theory”, although I don’t subscribe to them, because I think it doesn’t answer the question. If you could say fascism is a political religion, you then have to answer the question: Why didn’t the original religion suffice? And indeed, in my book, I translated and use the work of a 1930s, Austrian Jewish anthropologist called Lucy Varga, who went into the Swiss valleys in the 30s to study, almost as an anthropologist, how people were converted to fascism. What was interesting in Austria being a Catholic country is that they were converted straight from a very devout form of Catholicism. It was both the transmitter but also it wasn’t enough. In the United States, quite clearly, evangelical Christianity, and also in Brazil, evangelical Christianity is a entry level drug to fascism, but so is secular libertarianism. It’s quite interesting that so many of the libertarian activists step from 10 years ago have become authoritarian — whether they’re in these groups, but you know, they think the way fascists think now, they have the whole thing.

In my book, by the way, I’ve got this kind of five point checklist of what the fascist think and the great replacement theory is that the absolute heart of it, hostility to Cultural Marxism, equation of liberalism with Marxism, doing meta politics and waiting for the big catastrophe. That’s the thought architecture. It’s interesting that evangelical Christianity is not the only route. So what does that tell us? The neoliberal ideology has collapsed, it has no internal coherence. The individual replacements for it like libertarianism, like evangelical Protestantism, haven’t worked either. And so what we need to fear is that from QAnon — QAnon is just the staging post, it’s working a little bit like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion did for the Nazis, it’s a staging post theory to a full blown political religious conversion to something like Nazi-ism.

I do think it’s important, I just think we have to take it country by country. Ideally in the book with the Narendra Modi’s BJP Party, which is formally speaking, a right wing Populist Party backed by a fascist like mass movement, the RSS or the with a wider set of movements around that call this Sangh Parivar. As I understand it, although their Hinduism is devout, it is not particularly radical or evangelical. It doesn’t have the same character as the Southern Baptist churches have had. So we just have to take each of the religious or political conduits into Fascism and study them. My book is not an in depth study. There are case studies. I hesitate to raise it to this level, but it’s a kind of work of political philosophy to understand what are the philosophical roots of fascism and why are they so compelling to some very different sets of people? But yeah, it’s interesting.

For example, in Nazi Germany, by the time of the mass conversion of the German middle class to Nazi-ism around about 1932, 1933, one set of people had resisted and it was Catholics, the Catholic middle class. You see it within the drama series, Babylon Berlin. The hero of it, Gereon Rath is a Catholic, petty bourgeois, indeed bourgeois, from the Rhineland. The two areas that resisted were the Rhineland and Bavaria, which is also Catholic. It’s interesting. Why is that? Because Catholicism in Germany was kind of a coherent worldview that explained the world. What had collapsed was Protestantism as a worldview. And it’s very interesting from the American point of view, because the whole constitution is, to an outsider, looks Protestant; First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the idea of Manifest Destiny is a very Calvinist idea. So you’re dealing with a form of radical Protestantism. For example, in the United Kingdom it’s not so big. So let’s take each one as it comes. And let’s understand the the meta problem, which is the collapse of the coherent ideology of Neo liberalism, and neoliberalism inability to replicate itself, liberalism’s weakness, the left’s kind of in a mess. Again, on a case by case basis, country by country, we could go through that. So we have a very rapidly to create what Daniel Guerin calls for in that book, ‘The Brown Plague’, the only way you stop fascism is by creating a living, breathing alternative says Guerin. We haven’t got time to create a mass far left party. We’ve got to create the living, breathing alternative in the form of an anti-fascist ethos; the ethos of anti-fascism. Which is what I talked about in the last part of my book, which is all structured around the story of Casablanca. That movie for me is an example of how one person taking a series of anti fascist actions forces other people to make decisions about what they’re going to do about fascism.

Sam Goldman 51:47

Thank you for that, Paul, and I wanted to give you an opportunity if there’s anything that we didn’t touch on that you think is essential for our listeners. Any last words.

Paul Mason 51:56

It’s been great discussing with you. I think that, let’s be concrete. What I’m talking about in the United States would look something like the Women’s March. Not just the march itself, but I know that the people on that committee, from the kind of Gloria Steinem wing of feminism, right through to a figure like Winnie Wong, who was around Bernie, and right through to some of the other women of color who made their way onto the platform, and really, let’s be honest, pissed off the bourgeois feminists. But nevertheless, for that moment, it worked. Because it was a moment at which the American liberal feminist establishment realized they needed the masses. They needed people of color, and they needed the left, and they needed the networked individuals. So two years down the line, I think we’re going to be looking at all the states who took part in Texas v. Pennsylvania, you know, all the states that that try to overthrow the election result will be suppressing the vote, they’ll be trying to return a House of Representatives that is blocked for the Democrats.

The fascist agenda will be back by 2022. They’ll be then on the offensive. The only question in my mind is: Is it going to be the Tom Cotton wing? The authoritarian militarist, classic authoritarian conservatives? Or is it going to be Trump and his dynastic family? If it’s Tom Cotton, we luck out, because we can deal with that. If it’s Trump, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell and all these absolute crazies around them, with millions of people now mobilized around an overt fascist-oid politics — because Trump is a work in progress, Ivanka is a work in progress, Jared Kushner, they’re works in progress. If it’s the latter, you’re going to need something like the Women’s March again, and it’s gonna have to be on the streets with 4 million people. That’s what worries me about the American situation. People realize very late, how quickly Trump himself was radicalizing towards the fascist agenda. As I say, I don’t think he is a fascist, I think his movement is consciously adapting and accommodating, even the GOP itself, is accommodating fascism. They then thought, Okay, well, there’s only one we’re going to defeat him, we brought him down. And they managed just barely just just through legal actions through judicial reviews to stop Trump stealing the election. In 2022, you can forget that. You’ve got the Supreme Court stacked against you, you’ll have 14 states, at least, gerrymandered to the point of oblivion, and their people will be on the streets. The question to everybody is going to be this: “Where is my body going to be? Not: “Where’s my internet avatar gonna be?” “Where’s my body gonna be?” And at the crucial moment, your body’s got to be between the fascists and their objective. So I don’t think we’ve seen the end of mass politics with January the sixth, I think we have to see the American left and the American liberalism find it’s place on the American Street.

Sam Goldman 54:34

I think that’s a great place close. I want to thank you, Paul, again, for coming on and sharing your perspective and expertise. You can pre order Paul’s book: ‘How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance’. And you can follow Paul to read more on twitter @PaulMasonNews.

Paul Mason 54:53

Thank you.

Sam Goldman 54:54

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. In reflecting on the conversation I had with Paul, there are two pieces I would highly recommend people dig into. First, Paul spoke about the French Popular Front at length. And while I agree on the need for unity amongst broad sections of people, and the need for explicit principled ideological struggle. To be blunt, I think what he’s calling for is impossible in the current situation for very deep reasons. The leadership of the mainstream “Liberal” Party, the Democrats, have proven that the stability of the system is more important to them than justice, even if maintaining that order leads to the order of fascism. One article available on RefuseFascism.org that speaks directly to this in very concrete terms, is The “left” Coalition that Kept You Off the Streets and Will Not Stop Fascism, by Coco Das. If anything rather than a so called popular, French style coalition, with ruling class parties opening up space for people’s power to be exercised, the exercise of people power outside of politics, as usual, may create situations where the Democratic Party is forced to end their conciliation with fascism.

A series that I recommend that speaks both to the same question and also develops a deeper, and in my opinion, better understanding of fascism than generations past, in some ways, similar to what Paul is speaking to, and in some ways different. That series is: This Coming Civil War and Repolarisation for Revolution. It’s by Bob Avakian and is available at RevComm.us.

Thanks again for listening. If you want to help the show, it’s simple. You can rate and review us on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. And of course, subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can chip in to support the show by clicking the donate button at RefuseFascism.org or Venmo Refuse-Fascism, cash app RefuseFascism, and be sure to let us know it’s off of hearing this podcast. As always, I want to hear from you. Let me know your thoughts on this episode ideas, questions you have guests you want to hear from topics you want to see explored. Tweet me @SamBGoldman, or you can drop me a line at SamanthaGoldman @RefuseFascism.org or leave a voicemail by calling 917-426-7582 You can also record a voice message by going to Anchor.fm/Refuse-Fascism and clicking the button there. You might even hear yourself on the upcoming episode. Thanks as always to Lina Thorne, Richard Marini, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce the show. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org to sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America.