JacquelineWe should resist fascism by maybe punching Nazis instead of assassinating them, and maybe by building a worker's party instead of doing either anarchist buddyism or Dem party shilling.
The problem with anarchist organizing is that it is often so localist and narrow sighted that it fails to make a coordinated challenge to capitalism. It helps in the areas it focuses on, but without a broader outlook and strategy that will inevitably dissipate into nothingness.
What is needed is not merely local aid networks and the like. What is needed is a political organization that is rooted in the working class and acts as a coherent entity inside an entire country, network of countries, or even the entire world.*
* I will acknowledge that the CNT FAI and other such organizations overcome this. This is more a criticism of individualist anarchism and the like
The problem with some anarchist's opposition to centralization is that it is so rigid and unyielding that it prevents the creation of large scale coordination altogether.
And the anarchists who support propaganda of the deed fail to understand that history is not made by great men. It is made by mass movements, social classes, and the dialectic of history.
Killing one bourgeois or one Nazi will not end capitalism or fascism. It never has and it never will. Capitalism and fascism are not even weakened by the deaths of one or two people, except on a very brief and temporary basis.
Our oppression is maintained by a vast machine that is oiled and geared by an army of people. It will therefore take an army to destroy it in whole. Removing one gear is almost never enough. When you convince yourself that it is enough, you are driving yourself down a path that is a waste of time that frankly might get you killed.
What we need is a strategy that reaffirms the role of the masses of working people in the abolition of capitalism. A strategy that is based in mass democracy, and not lone wolf terror, is the way forward.
No Luigi will save us. We collectively are our own Spartacus. We should act like it.
Burning Joint USAThe thing about propaganda of the deed is that it's often those acts that make a movement function more like an army in that it can embolden others to act fearlessly. It's not useless if you have a movement behind it ready to take things further. We don't currently have any movement like that, so it's hard to say it was the right time, but only future history books will know. Unfortunately the left can't even agree on if guns are even OK to own at this point, where we are being physically attack daily by people who don't have any concerns about gun ownership. So propaganda of the deed needs to be evaluated through an entire historical context. Luigi won't save us, but he did spark the beginnings of a movement and that is a beautiful thing. Even if his theory wasn't perfect and he wasn't a perfect person who always acted perfectly... He acted and has inspired some people to be a little less fearful in choosing to act as well. I think if there were the right cascade of similar acts, then it could lead to a truly liberational movement capable of liberating itself from some of histories most violent oppressors. Anyway, every raging river starts humbly as a single drop of water at some point. Whether we like it or not our behavior is bound to the same laws of nature and so from humble beginnings and a maybe a few bold actions along the way, will eventually come the movement that destroys this fascism. I am not sure what it will take and when it will happen, but it will happen and it may be started by one such action... If nothing else, each such action erodes the mythology fascism creates around it's own indestructibility. Over the arc of time, nothing is left unscathed.