[[link removed]]

ANOTHER WAY OUT: IN FIGHTING FASCISM, WE MUST CHOOSE OUR FIGHTS
WISELY  
[[link removed]]


 

William C. Anderson
January 23, 2025
Prism [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ We have to answer something. Who is fed, housed, given health
care, safety, and security by what we’re fighting about? Does the
fight we’re in lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for
the better or advance us toward a revolutionary shift? _

,

 

_“They’re not trying to impose dictatorship from a position of
strength, they’re trying to impose it from a position of weakness,
and fear.” – __Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin_
[[link removed]]

_“In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an
individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the
dominant aspirations.”– __Peter Kropotkin_

The start of 2025 has been unsurprisingly chaotic. As a surge of
wildfires engulfed the Los Angeles area, stealing people’s homes and
livelihoods, the news broke that the world’s lands and oceans
recorded the hottest year on record
[[link removed].] in
2024. Even before his inauguration this week, President Donald Trump
floated invading Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making
Canada the 51st state. While pointing his “America First” policies
toward expansionism and imperialist ends, he threatened the entire
“Middle East,”
[[link removed]] justifying
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He also sought a public health
justification for shuttering the southern border, much like the racist
U.S. gassing policies
[[link removed]] that
once inspired the Nazis. Since being sworn in, Trump acted on many of
his statements immediately and signed a flurry of executive orders
[[link removed]] redefining
birthright citizenship and gender as well as reversing climate
regulations, among other terrible things. These issues alone paint
just a portion of the picture of what’s coming to those of us who
plan to fight back. 

The truth of these moments and many others is that if we plan to defy
the order of the day, we must decide between what’s worth fighting
about and what’s not the best use of our time. Often, the fights we
choose to take up may not reflect the urgency other issues demand.
Those emergencies can become so great that they_ choose us_ when we
can no longer deny the need for our full participation. Now is the
time to commit ourselves rather than wait to be forced into action by
circumstances; this is the difference
[[link removed]] between
proactively planning instead of waiting to see what happens and
reacting to it. Resistance based on reaction may operate from the
point of disadvantage if it usually requires an antagonism or a spark
to mobilize a response. So, we’re forced to admit that we have
priorities if we understand this and then decide what to do about
them. 

Some fights are over issues that concern life and death, while others
may be about much more trivial things. Internalizing awareness here
will provide needed wisdom and precision about what makes the best use
of our time during compounding crises. The nonstop news cycle,
personal conflict, and the weight of survival make it hard to figure
out where to focus our energy. However, as recent years have shown,
it’s of the utmost importance to figure this out so that we don’t
exhaust ourselves from pointless ventures. The political moment
we’re in, where fascism is wearing us down, demands intentionality
that _should_ disrupt nonsense. Therefore, if we find ourselves amid
unserious squabbles, it’s a testament to the unseriousness of the
parties who choose to remain entangled. It’s not that we cannot
multitask and focus on multiple issues simultaneously or that we
should use dismissiveness to avoid accountability by labeling it a
“distraction.” It’s that an unending circus of
self-centeredness, celebrity drama, and political theater disrupts our
focus and degrades our perspective. 

Unimportant fights are disagreements like those that center the famous
and influencers as representatives people attach themselves to.
They’re the conflicts that become inundated with pitfalls of
disempowering political representation. That’s how the public ends
up arguing for politicians who don’t care about them and stars who
don’t share their class interests. This means that people must
overcome the draw to participate in celebrity worship, symbolic
issues, and other quarrels like the “petty ideological struggles”
Black anarchist Martin Sostre once spoke about
[[link removed]].
He said we have to “look at the substance,” and that’s what’s
always missing from so much of the messiness capitalist culture
inundates us with. If more of us had genuine, deep relationships, too,
many of the insignificant spats among us might subside. We can have
our differences and even dislike one another while recognizing the
gravity of this time we’re trying to survive. 

The oft-quoted psalm of revolutionary and author George Jackson to
“settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our
situation, understand that fascism is already here” rings hollow
among much of today’s “left.” Anti-intellectualism,
conservatism, and egos, among other things, make disputes a feature
and not a flaw of bickering denominations. Siloed, powerless people
fighting over who gets the most influence while those with actual
power pummel them all is undoubtedly a goofy scene. This reality may
overshadow another one of Jackson’s statements
[[link removed]]:
“Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new
ideas.” Accepting dogma and making movements past into prescriptive
guides regurgitates old tactics, offering us new defeat. Bitter unity
isn’t the answer; it’s often disastrous, too, but we have to
answer something. _Who is fed, housed, given health care, safety, and
security by what we’re fighting about_? Does the fight we’re in
lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for the better or
advance us toward a revolutionary shift? 

What are the most important fights, then? That may depend on where
you’re at and what the conditions say at a given moment. Someone
fighting an actual fire knows that putting out the flames around them
supersedes everything else at that time. The beauty of the Black
Panther Party’s intercommunalist proclamation, “survival pending
revolution,” is that it recognizes that we have to sustain ourselves
to have any struggle whatsoever. It’s what led them to strategically
confront problems about health care, housing, food, environment, and
state violence. And while the Party was certainly not free from petty
drama and avoidable conflicts, the model they established still
matters today. Nonsensical, repetitive debates on social media and
posturing keep tiring us out. We need as much energy as possible to
challenge the dominant status quo of capitalism. It’s one of the
main reasons we have to be able to differentiate between disputes that
happen for dispute’s sake or because people or entities around us
want to create problems.

Our efforts should abandon self-aggrandizing optics, clout chasing,
and content creation that doesn’t constitute a counterforce against
oppression. The way we wage confrontation should _be a threat_ to
whomever or whatever is putting our lives at risk. Threats have to
become kept promises too. When Black Power-era theorist and former
member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers Kimathi
Mohammed reflected
[[link removed]] on
the successes and failures of that time, he arrived at a conclusion
that’s important now. Mohammed stated that we needed to
“reorganize our thinking.” That reorganization “of our political
thinking,” he said, “is necessary because it has become too
narrow, limited, and elitist. Unless we immediately begin to expand
our vision, we will constantly find ourselves submerged in cynicism,
pessimism, and despair.”

He continued, “A feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness has
already begun to surface. … But that particular feeling can easily
be overcome. … Not only must our analyses show our accomplishments,
they must also show our failures and mistakes. If such analyses are
properly done, we will have the type of transmission fuel needed to
transcend feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.” One of the
main mistakes generations have made in recent years is the sort of
radical tourism and spreading of ourselves too thin. Focus is
necessary to beat back everything that needs to be destroyed enough to
gain new ground. 

Our enemies and the oppressive elements we know all too well may not
be as strong as we imagine. Teen hackers have made breaching federal
authorities into child’s play
[[link removed]].
We saw this tyrannical president hide in a bunker
[[link removed]] when
we rose against state violence in response to the killing of George
Floyd. Even now, we’ve seen that a lone gunman
[[link removed]] with
something to prove has sent shockwaves throughout the ruling elite.
These aren’t distant memories; these things all tell us a lot about
what’s possible in today’s world. 

A call to focus and concentrate our efforts is not necessarily a plea
for centralization. Instead, it’s about being led by what the world
around us is showing us our primary concerns should be. Sometimes, the
stakes are so high it’s not even a question or a debate; it’s an
immediate action that happens without question. You’re supposed to
duck when someone throws a punch, but if you’re too preoccupied, the
blow will hurt that much worse. We can look around and see who’s
hitting us and who wants to knock us out of the frame completely.
Instead of waiting for them to swing on us again, let’s evolve and
hit them first.

_William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham,
Alabama. His work has appeared in The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British
Journal of Photography, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the author
of The Nation on No Map (AK Press 2021) and co-author of As Black as
Resistance (AK Press 2018). He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot
Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black
Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies,
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves
to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014)._

_At Prism, we believe that justice requires the whole story. When
Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the status
quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the truth—and it
wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective liberation and
justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we could forge by
disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering the hard
truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the acute
impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of color to
tell their own stories, and those of their communities._

* Popular Resistance
[[link removed]]
* organizing
[[link removed]]
* Anti-Fascism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]