Three Way Fight

In 2004, a small group of revolutionary antifascists started the Three Way Fight blog and website to share information and analysis about political movements and the context in which they operate. The project’s supporters rejected the conventional liberal binary that portrays authoritarian extremists threatening a democratic center, but also the standard leftist binary that sees fascism and liberalism arrayed together in defense of capitalism against the working-class left. As editors of the website later put it:

At the same time, unlike many on the revolutionary left, we believe that fascists and other far rightists aren’t simply tools of the ruling class. They can also form an autonomous political force that clashes with the established order in real ways, or even seeks to overthrow global capitalism and replace it with a radically different oppressive system.

This meant that “Leftists need to confront both the established capitalist order and an insurgent or even revolutionary right, while recognizing that these opponents are also in conflict with each other.” Hence the term “three way fight.”^[1]

The essays and interviews in this book offer an in-depth look at three way fight politics: where it comes from, what it has to say about recent political struggles and the systems that underlie them, and how it can inform sharper and more effective organizing strategies for human liberation in the time ahead. The voices we’ve brought together don’t always agree, but they’re grappling with a shared set of questions largely using a shared set of tools. We offer them both to help clarify how we got to the present moment and as an intervention in ongoing debates among radicals and antifascists on how to move forward.

As a concept and a political project, three way fight was shaped by earlier developments in the US left, particularly Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO). ARA was a large, decentralized network of local groups focused on a physical, direct action approach to combating fascist and far-right organizing. ARA, which was founded around 1987 and reached its peak of activity in the 1990s, emerged from skinhead and punk subcultures but grew to become a broader, more diverse youth-led movement. While most ARA members were nonaligned ideologically, many members were anarchist or antiauthoritarian in orientation, and Marxist, feminist, and other perspectives were also represented. Unlike liberal “anti-hate” organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, ARA rejected relying on the police or the courts, and some of its chapters organized against racist police violence and state repression as well as the far right.^[2] In 1998, ARA added a commitment to “abortion rights and unrestricted reproductive freedom for all” to its Points of Unity. The new language reflected a struggle against sexism within ARA, as well as the network’s increased focus on clinic defense and many militant antifascists’ developing understanding that the far right encompassed Christian rightists as well as neo-nazis and that the fight against patriarchy must be at the forefront together with the fight against white supremacy.

Unlike ARA, STO was a relatively small Marxist organization, active from 1969 to about 1985. An offshoot of the New Left based primarily in the Chicago area, STO developed a distinctive form of independent Marxism—influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and C.L.R. James, among others—that emphasized working-class agency and targeted racial oppression as a key contradiction within the US working class. STO practiced a rare combination of revolutionary politics and public openness about internal debates and disagreements. STO also developed a concept of fascism that sharply challenged both Stalinist and Trotskyist assumptions, arguing that while fascism has “intimate connections with the needs of the capitalist class,” it also “contains an anti-capitalist ‘revolutionary’ side that is not reducible to simple demagogy.”^[3]

Three way fight politics was also influenced by several other Marxist and anarchist political currents, and by investigative journalists studying the emerging rightist movements. Of particular note among the latter were Sara Diamond, who broke new ground in studying the Christian right as a well-organized, politically autonomous mass movement, and Chip Berlet, whose work included both anti-nazi organizing and investigation of police and FBI repression, and who helped found the antirightist think tank Political Research Associates in 1981. Berlet’s 1994 report Right Woos Left warned against far-right infiltration of the antiwar movement and the spread of conspiracist ideology in sections of the left. Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons coauthored Right-Wing Populism in America (published in 2000), which traced the long history of US movements that have combined antielitism with efforts to intensify social oppression.^[4]

Two events around the turn of the millennium highlighted the need for fresh thinking on the relationships between far-right politics, the capitalist state, and the left. The 1999 Battle of Seattle, a series of militant mass protests against the World Trade Organization, brought together radical leftists, procapitalist liberals, and far rightists within the amorphous “antiglobalization” movement. The 9/11 attacks in 2001, in which al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon, showed even more dramatically that global capitalism’s enemies could be found not only on the radical left but also on the far right.

An important response to the changing landscape was the 2003 book Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, with writings by former STO member Don Hamerquist, independent Maoist J. Sakai, Xtn Alexander, and others. Confronting Fascism put forward many positions that would become foundational for three way fight politics: that fascism is an active and dynamic current that doesn’t necessarily look the same now as it did in the 1930s or 1940s, that it feeds on popular hostility to big business and the state and has the potential to gain mass support in the United States and beyond, and that it represents a revolutionary challenge to capitalist power—not revolutionary in any liberatory sense, but in that it aims to seize power and systematically transform society along repressive and often genocidal lines.^[5]

The Three Way Fight website was launched in 2004 to continue this discussion. Like Confronting Fascism, Three Way Fight brought together Marxist and anarchist contributors and sometimes offered conflicting positions in dialog with each other. Over the following years, Three Way Fight writers developed a distinctive approach to radical antifascism, with core features such as these:

• We need to look critically at standard leftist assumptions about fascism: that “the cops and the Klan go hand in hand,” that fascism is always white and automatically white supremacist, that fascists and capitalists are basically working toward the same goals. Those assumptions are at best oversimplified and often out-and-out wrong.
• Antifascists need to take fascists seriously rather than dismiss them as liars, opportunists, cowards, or nutcases. We should try to understand fascist ideas and goals and what gives fascist politics the potential to appeal to masses of people. And we should pay particular attention to far-right militancy, hostility to elites and established institutions, and efforts to win working-class support, all of which pose a particular danger to liberatory anticapitalist movements.
• Political differences and disagreements between fascists and other forces on the right matter—notably differences over how to relate to the state—particularly because they may call for different strategic responses to combat them.
• Women’s oppression and gender politics more broadly are central, foundational issues for the far right, which has often been pulled between efforts to intensify patriarchy and efforts to build a mass base among women—issues which many leftists and antifascists have ignored or treated as secondary.
• Antifascism should involve efforts to understand developments in the global capitalist system and in ruling-class strategies, which shape the context in which both liberatory movements and far rightists operate.
• We need to combat far-right efforts to build alliances with leftists and also efforts to co-opt antifascism as a tool of ruling-class repression.