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Follow Us Revolution by the Book The AK Press Blog AK Press Home Events About Contact Search An Interview with Shane Burley, editor of ¡No Pasarán! Posted on January 12th, 2023 in AK Authors! , Events Shane Burley will be out promoting ¡No Pasarán! in January and February. Check out the (in person and virtual) event details and an interview with Shane, below. No Pasaran Tour Dates 1/22 – The Word is Change Books – Brooklyn (featuring Daryle Lamont Jenkins and Maia Ramnath) 7:00pm 1/25 – Making Worlds Books – Philadelphia (featuring Kim Kelly, Geo Maher, and Daryle Lamont Jenkins) 7:00pm 1/26 – Red Emmas – Baltimore (featuring C.B. Daring and Daryle Lamont Jenkins) 7:00pm 2/8 – Jewish Antifascism (Digitally), hosted by the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, 12:00pm 2/15 – Books and Books (Digitally, featuring Margaret Killjoy and Benjamin S. Case) 7:00pm EST 2/26 – Spokane Library (featuring Joan Braune and Shon Meckfessel) 2pm PST In your 2017 book Fascism Today you said, The center of antifascism has always been resilient communities, those that are resistant to fascist incursion because of the strength of multiculturalism and their sturdy social networks.” Can you give us a few recent examples of resilient communities whose experiences provide hope and guidance for our present moment? Yes, I think that the mass wave of mutual aid groups that very quickly responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and other nearby crises, like the forest fires in places like Oregon and Northern California, show a real change in how people are thinking about problems. There is a consensus that the state is not naturally the place you would turn to survive these emergencies, and with such glaring failures, like the inability or unwillingness to have a massive federal response to COVID, people simply started building autonomous networks of resilience. This is a mass adoption of the thinking and methodology that many marginalized communities have used for decades, in some cases centuries, for what the Black Panther’s called survival pending revolution.” These histories are perhaps the most vital to look to, such as how people received abortion care when it was labeled illegal, or how trans communities supported each other to get access to gender affirming care, or how communities defended themselves from white supremacists when the state both would not stop, and, in some cases, participated in the violence. Resilient communities are those that create safety and support structures that are not simply dependent on these larger systems of power, and that state failure is expanding and people are responding in kind. The real story of the new century is these counter-networks, how communities increase resiliency outside the auspices of the state. History has shown that achieving some kind of wide-scale social democracy profound enough to solve these issues is unlikely, but more importantly, we have the ability to meet people’s needs right now and, in doing so, we create the kernels of a new revolutionary social arrangement. Fascists in 2022 made a lot of headlines, from Patriot Front’s flash marches to Ye’s antisemitism and embrace of Hitlerism. How much do you think the movement gains traction from these viral blips versus the widespread condemnation we see in the culture? I think they have the ability to gain a lot of ground, primarily when they operate outside of what people understand as fascism. We are seeing a few major shifts. On the one hand, the alt-right may have been destroyed and Trump may be out of office, but we are seeing a mass adoption of many of their ideas across the GOP: the National Conservatives, the MAGA movement conspiracy theorists, the massive upsurge in Christian nationalism. Because so many of these movements have institutional ties, it becomes hard for many to view them as fascist because for so long white nationalism was understood as a primarily outsider, insurgent movement. This is what has insulated people like Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who was a part of the alt-right and who ducks that allegation by pointing to the elected leaders and media commentators who happily collaborate with him, such as Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene. At the same time, GOP figures like Steve King and Michelle Malkin are speaking at open white nationalist conferences, such as American Renaissance. So they are gaining ground by housing their movements inside of establishment communities. The other problem is the syncretic nature of fascist movements, who often hold such profound internal contradictions that people find it hard to locate exactly what is happening politically. Ye’s behavior is a good example: a Black musician collaborating with a white nationalist and a conspiracy theorist to preach antisemitism. This feels incoherent and it is, but this is how fascist movements largely work, they bring together people of disparate identities and goals and even inculcate people who would be harmed by the political ideas they are espousing. This has only become more fractured and less ideologically constructed as the alt-right, which was a relatively complete white nationalist ideology, declines and there are few ideological thought leaders to maintain a straight forward trajectory. This will make it harder for people to really confront racist ideas since they are coming from what people read as unlikely sources. As conservatives have normalized hate, conspiracy theories, and acceptance of political violence we see both their typical authoritarianism as well as rhetoric and action that can be labeled fascist. How do you suggest people parse out, discuss, and oppose contemporary conservatism when the overlap between business-as-usual and fascism seems to be increasing? Yeah, this gets to what we were discussing earlier. Right now the GOP is in a battle for its future, with a segment of the party seeing how Trumpism can create unstable markets and potentially loses elections (as was seen very clearly in the midterms) and those who are unwilling to cut their MAGA ties, are declaring the election stolen, who believe COVID is largely an opportunistic hoax, whose founding ideologies are conspiracy theories, and who are moving even further to the right of where Trump was at. Figures like Wendy Rogers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, J.D. Vance, candidates like Blake Masters, pundits like Tucker Carlson, state leaders across the country, and others, are dipping into the waters of a kind of soft fascism” of vitriolic nationalism (though with an attempt at cosmopolitan branding), conspiracy theories (usually of the coded antisemitic variety), extreme anti-immigrant, queerphobic, and apocalyptic rhetoric. The move to demonize trans healthcare and LGBT existence is currently the sharp edge of this, but I think we can also expect a kind of ecofascist prioritization of closing the border as the climate crisis deepens and compels migration northward from the Global South. As scholars like John S. Huntington have argued, there has always been a far-right ideological core to conservatism as a political movement, and the radicals and the more moderates still share some base ideological assumptions. As academics like George Hawley have tracked, the previous Buckleyite coalition of hawkish foreign policy, free market absolutism, and Christian-centric social conservatism has started to break down , and what we have ended up with is a choice between racist populism on the one hand, or pro-business obsessions on the other. The difference is in how certain they are that identity should determine a person’s slot in the social hierarchies, but don’t assume that makes any standard Republicans any less likely to push you off the cliff. They will just say it’s for economic rather than racial reasons. One of the defining features of fascism is a belief in inequality. It animates its misogyny, racial and ethnic hatred, and breeds a cult of hierarchy and domination....