Devin Zane Shaw’s Philosophy of Antifascism offers an account of the normative basis for militant or insurrectionary antifascist praxis, concluding with a reflection on the necessity of antifascism turning toward the project of decolonization. Drawing on the notion of the three-way fight, Shaw reads antifascism as an anti-capitalist praxis committed to radical egalitarianism, which thus must take seriously its oppositions to both bourgeois liberalism and fascism.
Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of the antisemite’s mode of play vis-à-vis the procedural norms and decorum of liberalism, Shaw contends that fascism is an unprincipled insurrectionary contestation of liberalism that nonetheless cynically deploys liberal mechanisms to neutralize its opponents but is not otherwise committed to the norms governing liberalism as such. Antifascism for Shaw, by contrast, demands an insurrectionary praxis because it values human freedom from a principled commitment to radical egalitarianism, and thus can accept neither bourgeois exploitation nor its fascist intensification.
Shaw’s analysis calls to mind Lewis Gordon’s analysis of left-right dynamics wherein the left’s commitment to liberalism entails a fight for its opposition’s right to oppose it, but the right’s overarching commitment to eradicate the left means it honors no duty to preserve discursive space for opposition. The upshot, then, is the failure of any opposition to the right locked strictly within the ethical confines of bourgeois liberalism. Hence, Shaw defends tactics not only of denying fascists discursive space (“no-platforming”) but also of direct action to deter fascists from, and limit their effectiveness in, the occupation of discursive space afforded them by the naïveté of liberal institutions, as in Shaw’s central image of the punching of the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
Chapter 2, on Simone de Beauvoir, is exemplary in working through this question. For Beauvoir, the foundation of ethics is the valuing of human freedom. Fascism, as I read it, values license, that is, the choice by the public at large to facilitate private violations of public right and public interest, manifested in the Euromodern context through efforts to systematically produce vulnerability by negating people’s access to public goods to thus make them prone to domination and hyper-exploitation by the elite. Fascism thus is an assault on the freedom of all in favor of an imitation of freedom though license for the few, which, as Shaw draws out in Chapter 5, functions not only through capitalist exploitation but also what David Roediger, invoking W.E.B. Du Bois, calls the “wages of whiteness.” Liberalism avows the freedom of all, but undercuts this by treating freedom as a substance to be meted out through recognition of concrete rights. Fascism, like forces of domination in general, manipulates liberalism’s relation to freedom as concrete liberties through making the license to dominate metonymic with freedom itself, eviscerating the freedom of the dominated. As Shaw’s analysis of Beauvoir shows, then, to genuinely value freedom requires uprooting fascist projects from the lifeworld, necessitating the ethical antinomies that insurrectionist, militant praxis entails.
For me as a reader, the locus of critical attention is the juxtaposition of Shaw’s affinity for Jacques Rancière’s radical egalitarianism in Chapter 3 and his attention, in the concluding Chapter 5, to the question of decolonization. Granting that Rancière is, among the text’s central areas of discussion, the one least familiar to me, I am not immediately persuaded that one needs the arguments from Rancière to get to the insurrectionary claims of Chapter 4, where “punching Nazis” comes to the fore, nor to Chapter 5’s considerations of decolonization. The Beauvoirian ethics seem sufficient, particularly if coupled with the analysis of Robert Williams and the penumbras of Frantz Fanon found throughout the text. Indeed, a different author may perhaps have swapped out Rancière for a discussion of Leonard Harris’s insurrectionary ethics, leaving the focus on militant antifascism as grounded in opposition to oppression rather than radical egalitarianism.
My concern is that the Rancièrean framework may be subtly at odds with some of Shaw’s anti-colonial analysis. I have in mind, in particular, Shaw’s appeal to Glen Sean Coulthard in Chapter 3. Coulthard argues that Nancy Fraser’s model of recognition presupposes the legitimacy of the liberal, settler-colonial state. Fraser’s logic would imply that non-recognition of indigenous sovereignty is rectified through recognition of indigenous persons, meaning the issue of a settler people establishing political institutions on a foundational project of eradicating indigenous peoples is not rectified. Though Shaw enlists Coulthard’s argument on the road to Rancière, it’s not clear to me Rancière’s politics solves the issue. Politics in Rancière’s sense is a mode of democratic subjectivation that contests the regime of policing and command. Rancière’s notion of politics seems apt to characterizing indigenous politics where it functions as an oppositional bloc within colonized territories. But if one is talking about self-governance among First Nation peoples, is this clearly the case? Must such peoples accept the illegitimacy of “policing” in Rancière’s meaning in order to sign off on antifascism and even decolonization? Does such acceptance of Rancière imply that the project of indigenous sovereignty is misguided since genuine politics must always be, in effect, anti-hegemonic? Doesn’t a normative grounding in Rancière imply at some level a recapitulation of the illegitimacy of the sovereignty of First Nation and indigenous peoples, which is here subordinated not to the recognition of the liberal state but to the recognition of the a priori equality of all persons?
As Lewis Gordon has pointed out, this is a point of contention in Fanon’s critique of Engels. Fanon viewed post-colonial sovereignty as highly fraught and prone to neo-colonial capture, but nonetheless necessary to combat otherwise indefatigable neocolonial forces. Fanon’s call to not imitate Europe can thus be interpreted as entailing, among other things, a project of producing other models of sovereignty, for which “command” could be creolized rather than dismissed altogether.
Consider here the rich reconfiguration of command by Zapatistas as mandar obedeciendo (to lead by obeying), something further elaborated in Enrique Dussel’s political philosophy. The prevailing tendency among much contemporary left thought centered on Euromodern thinkers is often toward a fetishism of anti-hegemonic contestation and fugitivity to the point of foreclosing efforts to think otherwise about states, sovereignty, and institutions through which anticolonial politics can have internally hegemonic functioning in preempting fascist and neocolonial capture. It is perhaps easy to make the case that the relation between the Zapatistas on the one hand and the Mexican state alongside U.S. and capitalist hegemony on the other hand can be characterized as Rancièrean politics. But does it follow that politics among the Zapatistas must accept the illegitimacy of all forms of social organization that could be likened to Rancière’s conception of policing?
I’m not persuaded by the general normative criticism of command that Shaw relates. I’m amenable to accepting that in some regions, others know better than I do and vice versa, prompting regional inequalities that make my consenting to be commanded legitimate. I don’t have a problem with a chef or bandleader who musters command as a mechanism to improve our collaborative project to make exquisite food or music. Problems arise where command is fetishized, such that egalitarian projects are a priori excluded, as in European classical music’s fetishizing of composers and denigration of jazz improvisation, or where command becomes domination by denying collaborators meaningful options through which to refuse commands by negotiating alternatives.
My inclination, then, is to view commitment to nondomination as adequate to the antifascist and decolonial ends for which Shaw adopts Rancière’s radical egalitarianism. Fanon’s thoughts on decolonization, I believe, are in this vein: for Fanon the colonized must resolve upon the inequality of colonizer and colonized, because whosoever sanctions colonization is choosing, in effect, to be a less valuable member of the human community, a point demonstrable through Anna Julia Cooper’s value theory. Accepting such inequality does not license the colonized to create a world in which they dominate the former colonizers, but it does mean that liberation must bracket any a priori egalitarian commitments that would rule out producing institutions capable of policing those who would welcome a return to European dominion. Indeed, isn’t Beauvoir’s point about articulating “our values” something that demands the space for a qualified egalitarianism rather than a radical one?
Such criticism notwithstanding, the normative thrust of the book remains intact if one brackets or perhaps even rejects its appeal to Rancière. At base, Shaw makes a persuasive case for why the commitment to value human freedom demands a commitment to combat fascism. Further, Shaw demonstrates that this commitment implies an imperative to limit the power of fascists, as opposed to merely accepting a liberal imperative to voice opposition. Though many readers may wish to call into question Shaw’s judgments about particular tactics for an antifascist politics, such questions, he compellingly demonstrates, are secondary to the primary question of whether human beings ought to engage in political strategies to undermine and uproot the power of fascism.
Let me close, then, with a reflection on the relationship between antifascism and decolonization. Shaw demonstrates that those interested in an antifascist politics should also be committed to the project of decolonization. Fascism in the North American context, Shaw shows, is rooted in the material and ideological firmament of settler colonialism, and a similar case can be made for fascism’s manifestations in other locales and eras. I have tried to suggest above that the implications of this insight mean that some further challenges to antifascist praxis rooted in Euromodern thought are in order: there are forms of antifascism whose intellectual rigor and/or political effectiveness are undermined by a lack of epistemic decolonization. But it does not follow that antifascism is a Euromodern endeavor. Rather, just as Shaw contends that “existentialism is an antifascism,” so too must it be understood that decolonization is an antifascism.(I would add, as well, that decolonization is an existentialism.) An approach to decolonization premised entirely on articulating purely “non-colonial” methods for thinking and acting, as Fanon showed, is inadequate. The problem of “dirty hands” is inescapable for those genuinely committed to uprooting fascism and coloniality. The project of decolonization then, requires ongoing efforts to identify and theorize the manifestations of fascism particular to distinct epochs and localities, and to work through the Beauvoirian “antinomies” with which antifascism praxis must reckon in order to have an honest self-assessment of what each community is struggling for and against.
If decolonization is an antifascism, then those starting from antifascist commitments would do well to consider Shaw’s case for the antifascist turn to decolonization. Likewise, those committed to the project of decolonization stand to benefit from considering seriously Shaw’s reflections on the ethical grounding for antifascist praxis, both in order to develop broader antifascist coalitions and to work through the self-critical endeavors that genuine decolonization demands. In brief, taking seriously Shaw’s work shows that a philosophy of antifascism calls for a philosophy of decolonization and vice versa.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
This is a helpful post, thank you.
Concerning your worry about Rancière in the book:
Perhaps the issue is rather one of what some analytic philosophers would call moral, not social equality, coming to be heard by breaking through common sense and demanding inclusion in the redistribution of sense. Here, “moral” would primarily entail the obligation to each other to be accountable to each other as beings with a consciousness, for whom it matters whether something makes sense to us, i.e. is justifiable and justified with us involved.
In such a very broad – autonomy based – way of understanding the axiom of equality, moral equals may accept social hierarchy in many forms, doing so as legitimate in their eyes.
That might alleviate some of the concerns you rightly raise about radical French, civic republican egalitarianism or anarchist egalitarianism re-colonizing Indigenous relations. It would also cohere with many Indigenous nations’ (in this settled continent) emphasis on moral relations – of kinship, trust, diplomacy, consent – leading the way.
You raise a crucial worry. Thank you again.
Jeremy