Insurgent Trajectory of Antifascist Genealogies: Review of Devin Z. Shaw’s latest book [Brotherwise Dispatch]

[This review was originally posted to The Brotherwise Dispatch on Dec. 1, 2024.]

Devin Z. Shaw, Genealogies of Antifascism: Militancy, Critique and the Three Way Fight, (Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb, 2024).  

by A. Shahid Stover

Devin Z. Shaw’s Genealogies of Antifascism insightfully works towards demarcating[1] a fundamental redefinition of fascism itself – for social activists – whose hope in the capacity of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society to prevent the rise of fascism is waning, – and for radical intellectuals – whose impatience with challenging fascism on terms conducive to reinforcing advanced neoliberal capitalist hegemony is at an all-time high. 

Indeed, rather than epistemically capitulating to the normative gaze, Shaw decidedly calls into question both liberal conventions and Marxist dogma about how to cope with the rise of fascism by seriously challenging the whole idea of fascism as “the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic (racist) and the most imperialist elements of finance capital”.[2]  The point is not that this definition is wrong.  It’s just that by taking no account of the correlation between coloniality in the Raw and the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, such a definition courts a lived irrelevance in the face of the needs of antifascist grassroots struggle in the times in which we now live.  “Fascist ideological, technological, and bureaucratic innovations created a vehicle for the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world to bring its wars of extermination home.”[3]  Each time fascism materializes in history is proof that it not only evolves ideologically, but innovates the very scope of its violence and terror methodologically towards achieving biopolitical[4] objectives of Blood (racism) and Soil (nationalism) that are often mistakenly conceptualized as an unserious threat of limited capacity to find wholesale purchase within the normative gaze[5] of established power.

As such, what concerns Shaw about some common leftist understandings of fascism cannot be reduced to a matter of philosophical semantics that abstracts from the Real without any imperative to Return to history through emancipatory praxis.  For what is often left undertheorized speaks to the Real of that all too volatile and reactionary class collaborationist element of settler-colonialism that overdetermines contemporary fascist organizing and recruiting amongst ‘white’ identifying masses, all the while being consistently veiled by the normative gaze of western imperialist power. 

Shaw reveals this populist threat as “between system-loyal vigilantism and system-oppositional violence”, even drawing from his previous work through emphasizing that “Far-right movements are system-loyal when they perceive that the entitlements of white supremacy can be advanced within bourgeois or democratic institutions, and they become insurgent when they perceive that these entitlements cannot.”^[6]  Therefore, an overriding concern of the book is the potential danger of engaging in social activism bereft of this kind of radical historical awareness, and to thus run the risk of undermining the grassroots struggle against fascism precisely where the workboots hit the pavement. 

The standard definition of fascism amongst leftists that Shaw very much takes exception to, has been extremely difficult to dislodge from the radical imagination, and rightfully so, insofar as it gained historical credence as the orthodox Marxist Popular Front position espoused by Bulgarian Communist George Dimitrov in 1935 and later ratified, with slight adjustments to explicitly include racism, by Black radical activist Bobby Seale, for the purposes of organizing a National Conference for a United Front against Fascism in Oakland, California in 1969 during the Black Panther Party’s unprecedented rise as the recognized vanguard of the New Left.[7] 

Seemingly anticipating Shaw’s critique, there exists journalistic coverage and critical commentary of that same aforementioned United Front Against Fascism conference by a literary organ representing some of the more radical elements within the Students for a Democratic Society(SDS).  The article reveals that “Seale surprised the audience by referring to ‘policemen’ and ‘cops’ rather than ‘pigs,’ and by hailing ‘progressive forces’ without mentioning socialism or revolution or armed struggle.”  Most damning is the conclusion reached that “Many of the delegates left the conference confused and disappointed.  The radical movement feared that the Panthers’ UF [United Front] tactic was attempting to enlist liberal support at the expense of revolutionary militancy.”[8]

Thus, there are some historical wounds that have yet to heal or be thoroughly thought through, and insofar as these wounds still accompany and afflict contemporary efforts that enable liberal cooptation of radical movements under the guise of achieving more expansive social recognition within the imperial mainstream, there is an emancipatory vitality to Shaw’s thought that cannot be ignored. 

Of particular note, is that Shaw’s critique of Dimitrov and Seale’s shared political orientation against fascism, a shared oppositional orientation that still unreflectively underwrites much of contemporary antifascist activism, doesn’t seek to suppress the emancipatory relevance of their Marxist inflected solidarity underneath typical academic platitudes, just for the mere purpose of demonstrating how once subversive rhetoric can now be discursively repurposed in adherence to the acceptable parameters of liberal versus conservative dualism within the normative gaze of established power. 

Instead, Shaw refreshingly outflanks this discursive pragmatic rapprochement between Communists and Black Panthers as providing an “orthodox line”, or more aptly put, a definition of fascism that loses concrete emancipatory traction in the streets of our contemporary world, where the question of human ‘being’ and human liberation is being fought over as we speak.  “These variations on the thesis that fascism represents an extreme faction or policy of capitalism all fall short for the same reason: they do not reflect the reality on the ground, in the concrete struggle between militant antifascism and far-right and fascist movements.”  For certain, what “the reality on the ground” reminds us, is that fascism realizes itself through a violent augmentation and exponentially coercive expansion of structural-inert violence that inscribes racist dehumanization and coloniality, from methods of oppression reserved exclusively for the underground of modernity, reconfigured to also now encompass the repression of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.

On this note, and certainly in the spirit of Shaw’s ongoing dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir that runs throughout the book, it is worth revisiting the work of Jean-Paul Sartre as an incredible testament towards disclosing the existential affinities of resistance and coloniality between life in the imperial mainstream under Nazi German occupation of France and the underground of modernity as lived Black experience situated within a western imperialist continuum.  “Never were we more free than under the German occupation.  We had lost all our rights, above all the right to speak; in the face of daily insults we had to remain silent, we were deported en masse, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners.  Surrounding us everywhere – on the wall, on the screens, and in the newspapers – we encountered the foul, insipid image that our oppressors wanted to us to accept as ourselves.  Because of all this we were free.  Since the Nazi poison seeped into our ruminations, every accurate thought was a victory; since an all-powerful police force tried to render us mute, every word became precious as a declaration of principle; since we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.  The often dreadful circumstances of our struggle made it possible for us to finally live out that anxious, unbearable, heartrending situation known as the human condition in a candid, unvarnished way.  Exile, captivity, even death, which in happier times we artfully conceal became our perpetual concerns; we learned that they were not avoidable accidents nor an external menace; but must be recognized as our lot, our destiny, the profound source of our human reality.”[9]

Let us keep Sartre’s breakdown of lived experience under Nazi German occupied France in mind as we bring him into dialogue with Frantz Fanon who discloses that “not long ago Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony”,[10] thereby giving voice to an emancipatory tension that exists in the Black radical imagination when trying to grapple with fascism.  For to be certain, many of the hallmarks of fascism, including an authoritarian power structure enforced through totalitarian surveillance culture and hypermilitaristic police presence, are actually historical constants that situate the lived positionality of Black community within a western imperialist continuum.

Indeed, this emancipatory tension is never lost on Shaw; who with Genealogies of Antifascism, actually doubles down on an insurgent philosophical wager of intellectual engagement that he first initiates in his previous book, Philosophy of Antifascism.  What unites both works is Shaw’s enunciation of Revolt through a “three-way fight to situate militant antifascism against forms of settler-state hegemony in Canada and the United States” as “constituted through the state mediation of the interests of capital and white supremacy.”

As such, Genealogies of Antifascism is an edgy polemical work written “for a politically committed, theoretically inclined activist audience”, with the unambiguous aim of introducing the conditions of possibility from which to organize socio-historical resistance against fascism in all its current reconfigurations.  The protean scope of this urgent task saturates Shaw’s thought with a weight that certainly lends emancipatory relevance towards disclosing that “when I argue that there is an epistemological rupture between the orthodox line and the revolutionary antifascist strategy that has informed the three way fight position, there is actually a dialectic of continuity and rupture.  There is continuity in that the orthodox line and the three way fight both call back to anti-imperialism.  Nevertheless, DuBois’ anti-imperialism and anti-racism – which in my view, play an important intellectual role in the revolutionary antifascist alternative represented in the three way fight – do not merely amend, elaborate or readjust the orthodox line.” 

In other words, it is in Shaw’s dialogue with the Black liberation discourse of W.E.B. DuBois that introduces much needed insurgent philosophical potentialities that disrupts the orthodox Marxist position that once united Communists and Black Panthers as insufficiently radical enough for the emancipatory imperatives of the times we now live – even if we acknowledge that to some in the New Left, a united front that included liberals and Communists may not have appeared that radical even back then.  Shaw goes so far as to disclose that “Between Dimitrov and DuBois there is an epistemic rupture that must be acknowledged and theorized in order to advance the development of revolutionary antifascist theory.” 

     For even as the disaster of history mediates against grassroots antifascist organizing and radical intellectual endeavor, Shaw does not hesitate to fight back against the normative gaze and the ever-growing threat of fascism that violates what Frantz Fanon discloses as “the dividing line” of coloniality in the Raw between the underground of modernity and the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.  “The colonial world is a world cut in two.  The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations.  In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.  In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes – all these aesthetic expressions of respect for established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.”[11]

And yet, here we must tread carefully, for according to Shaw, this does not mean that antifascist movements must find their political consummation in the historical preservation of “the dividing line” that socio-ontologically insulates the imperial mainstream-as-civil society from the structural-inert violence against human ‘being’ that inscribes modernity itself.  “Liberal antifascism maintains that far-right organizing can be curtailed by the inculcation of democratic norms, a generally free exchange of ideas, and the reinforcement of existing social institutions.  But liberal antifascist organizing then cedes organizational ground to these liberal social institutions, established media platforms, and – for the suppression of far-right movements, should the occasion arise – law enforcement.”  And it is against this eventuality of regarding the preservation of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society as the ultimate aim of antifascist organizing that haunts the insurgent trajectory of Shaw’s thought.  For there is no way to logically rationalize and hence politically sanction the structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul that pervades the lived experience of the underground of modernity without being existentially complicit with the normative gaze of western imperialist power.

And it is against the epistemic implications of this existential complicity with Empire, that we find Shaw drawn into a severe intellectual melee with Judith Butler over the contested terrain of nonviolence.  According to Shaw, this is “because Butler’s politics is grounded in recognition, they do not explore radical and revolutionary spaces that do not seek state or institutional recognition, nor do they explore how these organizing spaces need to defend themselves from hostile social forces.”

Thus, introducing and sustaining the conditions of possibility for “emancipatory community self-defense” is at the heart of the matter for Shaw, who refuses to be even slightly moved, and certainly not distracted, by Butler’s exquisitely penned poststructuralist discourse, “Indeed, if we set aside Butler’s conceptual terminology, we discern a fairly standard justification for nonviolent resistance: activists engage in nonviolent civil disobedience as part of a demand for a universal political right, and when state power or an organized opposition engage in violence it reveals how violence is used to protect the interests of a particular class or group.  It is a narrowly applicable practice, appealing to the political conscience of a ruling hegemonic bloc.”

Indeed, what makes Shaw’s critique of Butler so effective is that he takes her seriously as a thinker by refusing to dismiss her outright on either political or theoretical grounds.  Ultimately, Shaw exposes the epistemic fealty Butler exhibits to the normative gaze of modernity, by seeing the supposedly emancipatory trajectory of her thought through to its political implications at a grassroots level of antifascist organizing as unimpressively leaning into a reliance on established structures of power to guarantee the efficacy of nonviolence through protest-as-ritual event in the streets.  Or as Shaw cites Butler against Butler in what can only be described as a discursive coup de grace – “what relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics?”[12]

And therein lies the power of a work like Genealogies of Antifascism, its intellectual engagement with a lived experience of antifascist organizing at a grassroots level that is focused with an existential intensity on directly confronting far-right movements and fascist violence as they find concrete socio-historical realization in the world.  Hence, the significance of Shaw’s enunciation of Revolt as a “three way fight approach” that “positions militant practice against two contending social forces: the capitalist system (and its concomitant ideology) and system-oppositional far-right organizing” and which speaks to a discursive integrity of insurgent philosophical commitment towards emancipatory praxis against Empire that refuses and refutes attempts to be consummated in acquiescence to the normative gaze of modernity towards preserving the imperial mainstream-as-civil society at all costs.

*this is a slightly revised version of a paper originally entitled “Insurgent Genealogies” that was presented as part of the “Genealogies of Antifascism” panel during the 29^th annual meeting of the North American Sartre Society at Molloy University on October 25^th, 2024.

[1] J.Moufawad Paul, Demarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and Its Limits, (Winchester: Zero Books, 2019).

[2] The Black Panther Party, “Call for a United Front Against Fascism,” included in U.S. Antifascism Reader edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials, (London: Verso, 2020) p.269.

[3] Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017) p.132.

[4] “rooted in chattel slavery, the overdetermination of lived experience through the regulation of bodies towards social control of populations.” A. Shahid Stover, Being and Insurrection, (New York: Cannae Press, 2019) p.268.

[5] Stover, Being and Insurrection, pp.33-38.

[6] Devin Z. Shaw, A Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy, (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020) p.178.

[7] Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013) p.299-301.

[8] US Antifascism Reader, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials, (London: Verso, 2020).

[9] Sartre, “The Republic of Silence”, Lettres francaises, September 1944. Republished as “Resistance and Coloniality”, The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#17, Sept-Nov/2015. Modified translation mine own.

[10] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963) p.101.

[11] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.38.

[12] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1990) p.6.