Opening Remarks: Class Compositions in a Time of Fascism

Kevin's Van Meters's opening remarks from Class Compositions in a Time of Fascism.

Capitalism and the state engaged in class combat for nearly a hundred-fifty years. They tried to whittle union density down to under ten percent, they spent a hundred to undo New Deal programs, seventy-five to unravel the social contract and various productivity deals with sectors of the class.

The ruling class fought for decades to undermine the gains of black liberation, indigenous, peasant, feminist, youth and student, environmental and anti-nuke, queer, and allied social movements.

Most recently, massive cuts to social services are pushing the work of social reproduction and care on to those already performing that work without a wage.

Meanwhile, a whole set of practices — from worker insubordination and everyday resistance to unionization — challenge capitalisms’ command of work, our dominant life activity.

In fact, “we are a product of 500 years of struggle,” even if in this moment we convey a class in formation and class-struggle just reemerging, even though history does not bend in one direction nor another.

Autoworker, historian, and “organic intellectual” Martin Glaberman along with Seymour Faber write in Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency:

“The working-class struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to, not because it is educated to some “higher” consciousness by some outside force such as a political party. It would seem, also, that the struggle against capitalism includes all forms and levels of struggle, from individual to collective, from local to national (or international), from economic to political. In fact, it would be hard to conceive how the more general or radical forms of struggle, such as general strikes, factory occupations, or workers’ councils, could occur without the preexistence of more limited forms of struggle: sabotage, local strikes, the organization of unions, and the like.”

Fascism today is a response to working-class power as well as an extension of the impulses present in American society and Western Civilization as part of capitalism’s violent, systemic subjugation of oppressed and exploited peoples. But we are not here to tell a story of defeat.

“No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” “You Are Now Entering Free Minneapolis” “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî" (Woman, Life, Freedom)” From the anti-fascist slogans of Black Lives Matter to the celebration of power in the streets of Minneapolis to international feminist watchwords. These struggles are circulating and amplifying working-class agency, autonomy, and a “life in rehearsal.”

The fascist turn in the United States is a response to the resilience of working-class power. We can see this by looking to formal and informal practices and ways of organizing life, and innumerable places where working-class resistance endures including industries with high union density (such as meds and eds and the public sector), neighborhoods and municipalities with remaining working-class institutions.

What are our most prescient tasks in a time of fascism? How can working-class struggles of the past and power in the present-day inform the next steps we are going to take?

And we are here to begin to answer these questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfVtVW2WkY