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Video Game Socialism

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Asteroid 2

 

I hereby stake a claim to the world’s quickest solution to the video game Asteroids. That’s right, I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. I solved the cabinet version of Asteroids at the tender age of Fourteen. I don’t stake a claim to the highest score of Asteroids, because that’s an absurd achievement. Far more important is the discovery of a solution to the game, which allowed for that ridiculous feat of physical endurance otherwise known as a “high score.” I was certainly one of, if not the, earliest human being to hack Asteroids. I discovered a way to exploit an unforeseen loophole in its design, to be able to play in perpetuity on one quarter. Allow me to explain.

With a black and white, low resolution, and highly pixilated screen, Asteroids was one of the earliest cabinet video games that joined pinball, air hockey, and foosball at bowling alleys and arcades across the United States beginning in 1979. I was fourteen-years-old then and along with some junior high school chums, we frequented a bowling alley in Ashland, Oregon. There we would flirt, cause mischief, and play our favorite games. Everyone had a three-letter digital signature used to immortalize our achievements until they were superseded by ourselves or someone else. My signature was MOZ.

Unlike other early video games and those since Asteroids was solvable. What I mean by that is not that one could achieve a high score that ended the game, or exceeded the numerical capacity of the game to record, or that there was an exit to a maze that one could discover, but that given the way the game was constructed it was possible to play on one quarter in perpetuity for as long as one could stand there. To illustrate this I need to describe the game and what my successful strategy was for solving it.

At the beginning of a game one quarter purchases the obligatory three ships or “lives” that are initially allotted to a player. An additional ship can be earned every 10,000 points. To get 10,000 points a player must shoot asteroids that come in sizes from large to medium to small. If you shoot a large one it breaks into two, then those two, if shot, each split again. The smallest asteroid, if shot, disappears. Each size of asteroid has a corresponding point value, the smaller the asteroid the more points. When a screen is cleared a new level is accessed characterized by a greater number of asteroids on the screen that travel at higher speeds. The screen is open-ended on all four sides such that if you fly your craft through one side you will appear coming out the other. It is a two-dimensional field, no depth. The asteroids follow the same logic. In addition to these asteroids flying around in a seemingly random way, a space ship will appear at various intervals and attempt to shoot your ship.

A player’s ship is rendered as a triangle that shoots from the apex and is controlled by five buttons: left and right rotation, thrust, shoot, and a hyperspace button that makes your ship disappear and reappear instantly at a random spot elsewhere. The new spot might be safe or directly in the path of an asteroid.

These then are the essential elements of the game.

I remember the day I solved Asteroids because I played on one quarter from 10 AM until 11 PM (thirteen hours) at one point peeing into a bottle. I had to stop when the bowling alley closed; I could have played longer. I did this in 1980 or 1981. I could play forever and therefore solved the game.

I had three advantages over my classmates:

First, I managed to secure lots of quarters. Not all kids my age had access to enough money to play the game as much as I did. In this sense, I just played the game more than most, and thereby became a better player.

Second, I was built for video games: I had razor-sharp reflexes, Olympic level reaction time, superior pattern recognition skills, and strong hand-eye coordination. My brain was wired tight. 

Lastly, I hit upon an approach to successful play that was somewhat counterintuitive and very difficult to master. Move! Instead of being cautious and moving slowly to avoid being hit by asteroids, I would almost immediately begin flying through screens — usually up through the ceiling to emerge from the equivalent spot through the bottom of the floor. I would hold the thrust down and fly at near maximum speed. This maneuver was very difficult to master and took hours of practice, but once perfected something odd happened. Asteroids began to “slow down” much like the frequency of a siren shifts downward as it passes away from you, producing the Doppler Effect. Objects on the screen appear to slow as a thrown football does in mid-air if you are running in the same direction as it is traveling. Finally, patterns began to emerge in the way the asteroids were released at different levels together with how they behaved once struck by a shot from my ship.

There is a similar principle at work in today’s First Person Shooter (FPS) games. All things being equal it is better to be moving among enemies rather than stationary and having them move to you. This is behind what is arguably the most hated insult a player can be on the receiving end of in a FPS game, being called a “camper,” someone who just sits in a spot waiting to kill other players. This approach to play can yield results — for instance, if you are a sniper — but again, all things being equal, “movement is life.” 

Aside from these three advantages, there were two structural elements incorporated by developers into the game of Asteroids that made a solution possible. First, there was no cap on the number of ships a player could have in reserve, so if a player was good enough at staying alive through multiple rounds that player could continue to accumulate ships. I would often fill the entire screen with extra ships — thirty, forty, even fifty — which allowed for hours of play. 

Second, there was a cap to the complexity of asteroids released at successive levels. At some point the number of asteroids that appeared for a new level did not breach the threshold for my effective play; the complexity was daunting, with asteroids all around and a small spaceship that would quickly appear and attack my ship followed by another in rapid succession, but it didn’t keep increasing. It plateaued. It was difficult, but with enough of the right kind of play, I could handle it.

Was this a flaw in the design of the game? Probably. I think programmers either didn’t anticipate players would be able to function at that level of complexity or they wagered only a very small number would and that that was not a barrier to the game making money. The game did make money, with some 60,000 units sold by the early 1980s, but at some point the company recognized the flaw in their design. The Wikipedia entry for Asteroids notes that arcade owners began complaining to Atari about players (like me) costing them money. Atari released Asteroids Deluxe soon after as a fix. On the other hand, perhaps the very fact kids like me were able to solve asteroids after (but only after) hundreds, perhaps thousands, of quarters also contributed to making the game a hit. Whatever the case, I don’t think any subsequent cabinet video games allowed for players to dominate them such that one could play them for hours on one quarter. 

I glean two lessons from playing Asteroids as a kid: First, Big Tech can be beaten. There is always a hack, always a way around their code. Second, beating Big Tech is a pyrrhic victory unless one shares the spoils of that victory. Soon after I was able to accumulate ships I began sharing them with friends so we could all save quarters. I would like to think I was a budding socialist even at the tender age of fourteen. 

END

Liberals Lean In, But Don’t Go Anywhere.

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The contemporary Amerikan liberal is a specimen of political animal whose greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The roly-poly toy Weebles captures perfectly the broad but shallow political tradition that narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the recent presidential elections: “Tipping an egg-shaped Weeble causes a weight located at the bottom-center to be lifted off the ground. Once released, gravity brings the Weeble back into an upright position.” (Weeble–Wikipedia Retrieved 11/10/20). The weight is fidelity to private property and markets as the sine-qua-non of democracy; the “wobble” constitutes repeated attempts to solve the intractable and recurring crises that this unstable marriage of democracy and capitalism produces. The key here is that Weebles are very kinetic, but only over a very limited terrain. They move a lot, but not very far nor very quickly. They are remarkably stable, but also inflexible. To stop fascism and replace capitalism with a political economy that serves the many and not the few, we need to move. Weebles only move slowly, in a haphazard manner, and never in a predetermined direction. Push a Weeble one way, and it will lean the other, while its fulcrum will shift in an altogether different direction. Kinda frustrating. Indeed, they don’t fall over, but we should not mistake such leaning to and fro as movement toward any destination other than where they already reside.

Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive and faux feminist, is generally credited with popularizing the term “lean in” as a meta concept for contemporary progressives. The core operating principle behind “lean in” Democrats is the Weeble wobble. If one is standing still, to lean in is to initiate a deviation from a perpendicular position; it is to begin an inclination as one tips the body into a slope. Above all it signals a state of readiness to move in a particular direction. Such a maneuver does not, however, fully commit one to moving in that direction. When one leans there is always an element of hedging; always an aspect of waiting, of anticipating, and therefore the possibility of staying put or even reversing the lean and heading off in another, even opposite, direction. To lean is also by definition to be a bit off balance. Bill Clinton was the consummate practitioner of the political maneuver known as triangulation, something similar to the Weeble wobble, but with one major difference. Clinton’s triangulating was always a form of political calculation; the Weeble wobble is a function of the limits of the liberal philosophical horizon.

This Weeble wobble is almost always well-meaning but also ineffectual; it is earnest and committed waffling, passionate virtue signaling and much celebrated but empty representational politics. Hence, its popularity amongst liberal ideologues. They lean a great deal, but go nowhere. They are perpetually “leaning” towards justice, yet never actually moving to it. Everything is about intention, not results; opportunity, not equality. It’s no wonder so many people hate them. Conservatives, by the way, practice much the same politics. In times of social quiescence such middle-of-the-road centrism anchors capitalism by bracketing out radical solutions to systemic problems.

These are not those times.

Liberals always link political freedom to private property and markets; economic opportunity to the capitalist ship of state. This means they necessarily undermine struggles for economic equality, anti-racism, gender liberation and anti-fascism. To uphold the universalism and exceptionalism claimed by the United States of Amerika involves punching downward in an effort to thwart popular revolutionary struggles. When the political center no longer offers solutions to the recurring crises endemic to capitalism, people look elsewhere for an exit. They will look to fascism or socialism. The first is a door that opens to a cliff. The second must not be a door that binds us to more of the Weeble wobble. Our class solidarity and mutual aide is the only guarantee of a different future. That means we must break decisively with liberalism in the direction of radical democracy and equality.

END

Counterintuitives—Xenophobia/Xenophilia

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Xenophobia/Xenophilia

The Urban Dictionary strikes me as a lexical sewer, what to language that toilet featured in the film Trainspotting is to basic hygiene. It should come as no surprise that the alt right contributes to it with relish. I think it can fairly be characterized as their dictionary. That it is not, strictly speaking, a ‘dictionary’ at all nor a reliable representation of anything ‘urban’ but rather a Rorschach Test for emerging political pathologies is beside the point. Or perhaps that is the point.

Here’s a prominent and representative entry for xenophilia:
“A mental disorder where a person has an irrational attraction to foreign cultures, races and peoples. Often to the point of working against the best interest of their own family, race and nation for the benefit of hostile foreign groups.
“Did you hear that Sweden is now the rape capital of Europe?”

Here’s one for xenophobia:

“Taken to the extreme, an irrational fear of strangers or more broadly, a fear of those who are different. Taken in a more moderate way, a rational fear of those who are different in some significant way, such as race, ethnicity, culture, politics, religion. Since people live together in families and communities where blood ties and cultural similarities foster cooperation those who are different undermine this social solidarity…Since people are naturally selfish, they will lend aid and befriend those whom they see as similar to themselves….[I]t is rational to foster laws, social and economic policy, and attitudes that preserve one’s own kind in power. To do otherwise is to hand power over to those who will destroy one’s own way of life, culture, and political system…”

If you look up ‘racism’ or ‘socialism’ in the Urban Dictionary you will find equally noxious material mixed with the occasional, and more often than not, feeble, alternative.

As a corrective some comrades valorize xenophilia as an antonym to xenophobia. This is surely an improvement over the alt right screeds above, which do the opposite. But here’s the thing. As a reference point for radicals it is useful, but limited. Much as the touchstone liberal shibboleths ‘diversity’, ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘race relations’, there is an element of bullshit here. Allow me to explain.

For working class peons in the tourism and service industries it is an inescapable fact that the overwhelming majority of interactions had with ‘diverse people’ is as their servants, their underlings, their step-and-fetch-its. The only people who take vacations to exotic lands are the well off with disposable income, or people without much disposable income who envy, and therefore emulate, those who have it. We poor and working people don’t travel much, so our interactions with ‘other people’ most often involve a power imbalance, summarized in that noxious imperative, “the customer is always right.” If you appreciate that phrase, you internalize your oppression, or enjoy inflicting it on others. I don’t. But that’s the nature of a tourist economy. The only thing I hate more than a tourist is a celebrity tourist.

I have therefore developed a very keen hatred. My stomach turns and churns when I hear the Queens English enunciated from a Hermès suit, the North Atlantic lockjaw pronounce ‘Maarthaa’s Vin-yaard’ from a Polo shirt, or perhaps an East Coast asshole snap their fingers for attention.

In this sense certain languages, dress, accessories, and behavior set me off. You could say I have become ‘prejudiced’ toward tourists–of all backgrounds. I know in a sense this is irrational; that I am ‘prejudging’ based on stereotypes. But in another sense it’s also a defense mechanism, one that is necessary for the preservation of my basic human dignity. So I own that prejudice by placing the burden of evidence to prove otherwise upon them. Is it possible then to have a positive prejudice?

My interactions with the globetrotting rich have been, on the whole, really distasteful. Wait, that’s not strong enough. They are scum and I hate them. That’s better.

These encounters then linger in my mind as dog shit I can’t scrape off the bottom of my shoe. I cannot begin to recount the number of times I’ve had a twit make a comment about the homeless, Asian drivers, Black kids with saggy pants, the lazy Latino road workers, the white opiate addict. They will often unthinkingly assume that because I am a white guy in my 50s, and at least not outwardly and obviously an opiate addict, I will laugh along with them and share their contempt and disgust. I must be a deplorable. So it is. I am a deplorable–just not their kind of deplorable.

If it’s a racist comment, what they get in return (when I’m feeling safe enough to do it, which is not often, because I am a coward) is as vehement a condemnation of their unfiltered ‘whitesplaining’ vitriol as I can muster. Sometimes I’ll cap it off with the phrase “I’m a race traitor”. That’s always a conversation starter.

I know that in spite of their wonderful diversity of languages, religions, cultures and identities they are also united by one singular difference from me: they have class power over me and my coworkers and wield that power, especially when on vacation, in a more unfiltered manner then they might otherwise. That’s another way of saying rich people are actually at their worst when enjoying their leisure time. What they say in private–and if I’m there serving them, it is private–has never really been adequately captured in film or novels, much less social science. The reality is a horror that changes even as it stays the same. But it’s always there, and I have no choice but to step in it again and again. That’s the important part to remember.

So here’s the rub. How does one inculcate an appreciation for different peoples from different cultures when all of ones experience is as degrading and dehumanizing as I’ve described above? Too often what is prescribed as an appreciation of difference is experienced as, and in a very real sense is, subservience and abject humiliation. That is not a deformity of the world we live in, an unfortunate and necessary by-product of progress; it is a constitutive element of the rule of the few over the many. So how to uphold the primacy of rebellion without collapsing into a destructive and pointless rage?

We must remember and point out, again and again, that we have more in common with that vast exploited and dominated humanity from all cultures than we could ever have with our masters, or their masters, whatever their language or ethnicity.

When my hate is pure it is sharpened by a critique informed by race, class and gender. Sounds kinda counterintuitive. So it is.

If you use frameworks of diversity and privilege, access and opportunity, xenophobia/xenophilia without social class, you are a liberal, or worse.

If you are forever fixated on rearranging the chairs at the table rather than upending the table, your politics amount to that of a banquet manager or event planner. If you think different faces in high places accomplishes anything other than cosmetic appeal, your politics are as that of United Colors of Benetton ads of yor. If you think philanthropic largess has any meaningful role in politics short of its extinction, you are a financial adviser, not a leftist, much less a revolutionary.

It’s all business. That fact must cease to exist. So long as it rests on the ill gotten gains stolen from us, which is, after all the foundation of all wage labor, it must be overthrown, in its entirety.

However much a philanthropic plutocrat spends down a fortune, however quickly it is spent, it won’t be enough and it won’t be fast enough. Why? Quite simply because it doesn’t belong to them in the first place.

It is not enough to argue for civility and safe places. One must affirm the right to righteous rebellion, and the uncivil, unsafe (for them) character of that rebellion. Then we can ask: Is that rebellion shaped by the power of a critique loaded with race, class and gender? Hopefully we can answer yes, always and everywhere. Then the right of all people exploited and dominated to be free can be upheld.

Our common circumstances should not be lost through a fixation on our differences, real and imagined, not least because it makes impossible the urgent task of theorizing an enemy. And there is an enemy, not just a ‘system’. That enemy is structural, institutional, and individual. They–the roles they play, the status they enjoy, the positions they occupy, the surplus value that accumulates to them, the mirrors they gaze longingly into–are also the meat-sacks we call our ruling class. If they are meat-sacks, they are mortal.

I’m getting some of that shit off my shoes, now. I feel better.

Anything less is sophistry, at best, delusion at worst; both thereby ensure our capitulation and defeat.

We’ve had enough of that; time for something different.

When I hear it, read it or watch it, I’ll let you know.

END

‘Open’ vs ‘Closed’ Borders: A False Binary

03 Saturday Nov 2018

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In the mutilated discourse called ‘immigration’ the false binary of the ‘open’ or ‘closed’ border is often posed absent any discussion of the colonial and imperialist wars that shape these vast movements of people. Whenever one speaks of attacking the legitimacy of fortress Europe, the United States’ militarized border with the global south or the complex of security barriers that isolate the state of Israel, one is immediately said to be in favor of ‘open borders’ and then the resultant chaos such a calamity would bring. I am opposed on principle to the way those borders structure and deform human life–creating categories such as ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’, ’emigrant’ and my favorite, with all its racist and colonial baggage, ‘expat’. But even when one takes the high road and insists on ‘asylum seeker’ rather than ‘migrant’ the trend of upholding this vast movement of people as the problem remains.

The ephemeral exigencies of American electoral politics play only a minor role in this. Obama deported–what is that number?– 2.5 million souls? We must explode this absurd binary of open and closed borders. The European Union does not represent ‘open borders’ but rather the Troika managed regulation of human labor and bio power which must meet the demands of capital–austerity and restricted movement for the many, flexible and brutally disciplined labor markets to prop up the few. When ‘borders’ are discussed as ‘facts’ that cannot be challenged, as ‘reality’ or a feature of the ‘national question’ which must be observed and accepted, lest one engage in ‘aspirational’ politics, or wishful thinking, the door to fascism gets propped ajar as it cannot be with a political program of socialist internationalism, rooted in solidarity. To effectively fight fascism we must attack the very foundations upon which borders are maintained. But not all borders, just those that are essential to neoliberalism and fascism alike. The anarchist slogan of no borders is correct, it just needs better focus.

The only way to break free from the straitjacket of ‘migration’ as an ‘issue’ and the endless racialized taxonomy that goes with it is to stand steadfast on the principle of internationalist solidarity. The perimeter and internal borders that structure our lives are essential to both neoliberal and fascist domination. Any analysis or discussion that begins by accepting as legitimate that which is illegitimate simultaneously upholds a right to regulate human labor and bio power through its endless categories of fully or lesser humans. This process turns our gaze from the juridical, material and political constructs of borders to the question of whether those intent on breaching those borders have a right to do so–whether they have a good reason to ask for asylum. But it matters not at all why people from the global South are moving north, only that that are moving north and that there are people helping them do so. At this historical juncture the most radical and far reaching act a revolutionary within the global north can take is to materially support that flow of humanity, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is a good thing to do, but because it is the first necessary detonation of a 21st century socialist revolution–it is both a signal that it is underway as well as the concrete expression of the direct action needed to bring it about.

It will only be through the successive development of the Four Loci Of Attack (or something like it) and their expression as a concatenation of mutually reinforcing events that any one locus comes into being; that these agents of history become classes for themselves. Each social class cannot come into being separate from the other three.

Border attacks need manse occupations. The next complimentary phase will be housing and rent protests–mass non violent direct action aimed at palatial estates, penthouses, resorts, yacht and golf clubs. Anywhere the elite live, reproduce and recreate.

From the NYT

“But Mr. Trump’s dystopian imagery has clearly left an impression with some. Carol Shields, 75, a Republican in northern Minnesota, said she was afraid that migrant gangs could take over people’s summer lake homes in the state.

“What’s to stop them?” said Ms. Shields, a retired accountant. “We have a lot of people who live on lakes in the summer and winter someplace else. When they come back in the spring, their house would be occupied.”

Oct. 22, 2018

My response, from the film Almost Mercy:

Exactly…

One day we will look upon these fortresses as so much concrete and steel that had to yield to the far more powerful force of human freedom. Walls are never a guarantor of freedom, but a singular impediment to that freedom.

Antifa Spycraft

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Antifa Emblem

I probably cut an odd figure in my Carhartt Washed-Duck Tool Pants, black Thrasher hoodie and industrial neoprene gloves. Waist-deep in a dumpster I am making a fashion statement of sorts, wading through the quotidian refuse of an office park: coffee grinds, fast food containers, styrofoam peanuts, cardboard boxes, used printer cartridges and, much to my chagrin, the occasional dirty diaper. It’s 1990 and my comrades and I are ‘dumpster diving’ out in the suburban sprawl of Portland, Oregon. But it is neither food nor salable commodities we seek. We are churning through garbage in search of the political droppings of a far right organization housed there. The take from this ‘trash cover’ (to use a term of the trade) could help neutralize a far-right group, or at least make less effective their attacks on vulnerable communities. After a few night’s worth of applied garbology–Disco! Reams of perforated computer paper reveal detailed membership lists. We don’t have time to do anything other than scan it–the headings confirm it is from our target–so we bag the loot and skidaddle.

Your trash, my treasure–asshole.

From there the black garbage bags are transported to a warehouse where the really difficult slog begins. We spread out a large tarpaulin and separate the wheat from the chaff. What we call raw, primary data–everything from membership rosters to post-it notes, utility bills to grocery lists–is sorted and prepped so as to be of some use. Then we feed the raw data into already existing databases and files, cross referencing it to identify matches and points for further analysis. In other words, manual data entry is how we transformed data into information (no shortcuts from analog to digital back then). If we do our opposition research well, that information can reach its final form: actionable intelligence. For instance, the computer printouts provide detailed information on the targeted organization’s supporters–donation amounts, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, etc. Some of those donors may not want their identities released to the public. We do. Likewise, the discovery of internal memoranda can provide a window into a group’s organizational capabilities, relations with other political formations or even internal dynamics, such as factional fights, that we can exploit. Finally, a report can be generated and the findings ready for dissemination. Then it’s back into the dumpsters and the process repeats itself. From data collection to information analysis to actionable intelligence.

Our fashion statement is also therefore a political statement.

In all of this our team of researchers were practicing a form of ‘para politics’, i.e., political conduct apart from voting or demonstrating, polling or political speech. There are other, less charitable meanings associated with this term, but I am employing it here in a relatively value neutral manner. This is, of course, the province of the Antifa. For our purposes here, let’s call it Antifa spycraft.

If my late-night shenanigans of decades past often yielded material for critical print, radio and television stories on the far right, they also often helped communities better protect themselves from attack. In this case, our information helped ‘out’ more than a few ‘down low’ bigoted businesses and politicians. Oh, and it was legal. In many locales, the laws around trash collection are often ambiguous. In this case, because the material we absconded with was in a dumpster, it was no longer private property. Likewise, depending on your locale, once your garbage can is out on a sidewalk or street, it may be free for anti-fascists–or fascists, for that matter–to rummage through. This low tech tactic of opposition research–today’s equivalent of hacking someone’s digital footprint–was a time-honored weapon in the Antifa arsenal. But not the only weapon.

If back in the day we had a ‘trash cover’ on an enemy political group, there was a good chance we also had an infiltrator attending meetings and other activists taking down license plates and shooting video and photos of their events. Much like the shitheads at Project Veritas and Brietbart News do now, but long before those clowns were selling their hack jobs to their paymasters, we pushed the limits of acceptable political engagement. Today, effective anti-fascists, especially those grouped around Rose City Antifa and It’s Going Down, as well as activists featured in Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook understand this. It’s well past time to have a debate with those socialists and other radicals who don’t seem to get it.

That the political tradition and contemporary efforts of the Antifa are valuable, even essential, to the broader socialist struggle is not accepted by all comrades. In spite of an honorable and effective history, there are left radicals who not only dismiss this work, but denigrate those who practice it. Quite a few regard the most militant and therefore visible actions of the Antifa as anathema to our broader struggle. Many misguided socialists prefer to ignore this vital work or, when such intelligence is used by an Antifa fighting force, such as in Charlottesville, raise cries of ‘adventurism’, perhaps laced with a quote from Lenin on infantile disorders.

But if you ask this old ghost there is nothing more infantile than attacking the work of comrades you know next to nothing about; except, perhaps, doing so from a Marxist theoretical framework so sclerotic it can regurgitate that fatal stupidity all veteran anti-fascists are familiar with: “The enemy is not fascism as much as it is capitalism that exploits the working class according to democratic and civilized norms that would never be associated with the swastika or other fascist regalia.” (‘Antifa and the Perils of Adventurism” by Louis Proyect, August 15, 2017. My emphasis). Proyect, whose nom-de-chair is The Unrepentant Marxist, slanders antifa activists when he’s not busy digging himself out from under all the free dvds (he never tires of letting us know) tinseltown sends him for film reviews.

He goes lowest when addressing the street battles between anti-racists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlotesville last year.

He writes, “Turning now to Charlottesville, it is obvious to me that if the protests had been disciplined and under the control of marshals such as was the norm during the Vietnam antiwar movement, there would have been much less of a chance that James Fields would have been able to drive his Dodge Challenger into a crowd, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.”

Here Proyect is laying the death of Heather Heyer at the feet of the Antifa, instead of where it belongs, with the neo-Nazi who ran her over. Elsewhere he refers to Antifa activists as ‘boys’ engaging in ‘childish acting out’. And unruly boys need discipline, don’t they? Proyect apparently wants cops, in the form of movement ‘marshals’, to get them back in line, with a spanking, if necessary. This bit of scolding he digs up from his glory days in the abject failure that was the Vietnam antiwar movement. But the important lesson of Charlottesville is completely lost to Proyect, which is in the role the Antifa played in protecting religious pacifists from attack. Cornel West testified to this development, something that should be built upon. Leftists with integrity, who know when to shut the fuck up when they are out of their element of expertise, should support the Antifa, not hang them out to dry.

What Proyect does not understand is twofold: the nature of neo-fascism in the 21st Century and how a corresponding anti-fascism, to be effective, must be somewhat different from other forms of protest and organizing.

By definition Antifa organizing must contend with vigilante forms of attack–those that have their origins largely outside the state repressive aparatus. In other words, fighting racist assholes is not the same as going door-to-door collecting signatures for a ballot initiative or candidate, much less reviewing the latest art house cinema production.

The hinge that supports the door through which all revolutionary antifascists must pass–from a coherent definition of fascism to a retooling of anti-fascism–is intelligence, by which I mean spycraft. There is no substitute for knowing your enemy, preferably much better than they know themselves. No one else will do it. Cops reduce everything to their bailiwick: criminality. Reporters personalize the far right, always looking to sell a story. Academics do post-mortems with an eye towards predictability–usually unconnected with the flesh and blood Antifa struggle and therefore too little, too late. Liberals wring their hands about free speech and fumble about for that phantom limb within the democratic party that might deliver them from ‘hate’. Anti-fascists are the only political force intent on destroying both the conditions that continually regenerate fascism as well as the recurrence of the fascist plague itself.

This role can only be successfully carried out by anti-fascists who employ measures of antifa spycraft against our enemies. One cannot gain this critical advantage through anything other than counter-intelligence: no amount of long-form analyses of the falling rate of profit or the changing demographics of the working class will tell you this and it cannot be divined through oracles–whether in the form of tea leaves or data science. Anti-fascists must have the ability to infiltrate neo-fascists both to disrupt and neutralize their efforts and to protect communities they attack.

How to do this begins with a counterintuitive hidden in plain view. The state, law enforcement in particular, is governed by a set of regulations that are not the same as those that govern citizens and many others. People can engage in intelligence gathering in ways that are often (though not always) rendered problematic for a cop or official. Furthermore, the person of interest to an antifa spy is often not a public official but a private citizen, perhaps a public figure, in many ways more open to surveillance and their networks thereby to penetration. This also applies to the civic and political groups a far right activist works with. While it may be quite beyond the technical capability of an antifa activist to hack the confidential informant records of a local cop, it is certainly within their capability to wade through the trash of a local fascist.

Today, many Antifa groups continue in this same tradition with detailed, publicly available and actionable intelligence on far-right activists–mug shots, addresses, workplaces, quotations, etc. Furthermore, contrary to claims that it’s too expensive and/or complicated to practice spycraft (leave it to the professionals!?) amateur spies are essential to the Antifa. Another way to think about this is that the type of struggle the Antifa is engaged in will in large part determine its methods, much like clinic defense organizations have long utilized opposition researchers in their work defending clinics against the anti-abortion movement, especially when they cannot rely on the state to do so.

It should be obvious that fighting the far-right is not the same as fighing corporations or the state; and the Antifa is not synonymous with the Black Bloc, another elementary distinction that eludes Proyect, but will have to wait for another time.

To continue, a cop generally has to have ‘probable cause’ to search through someone’s garbage and will likely be required to leave a paper trail (digital footprint) of their activity. In other words, because of the oppositional nature of much of the far right–the fact that it occupies a contradictory relationship with the state, often outside of it and even opposed to it–forms of anti-fascist resistance can penetrate it by different means. Opportunities for disrupting the far right present themselves in ways that organizing a union drive at a multinational corporate factory do not, and, also, that creative intelligence work can provide the basis for work between communities that might not otherwise work together. This doesn’t, of course, mean that elements of the state don’t overlap with the far right (after all, Donald Trump is president) but that anti-fascists need to take the threat of their activism seriously.

In my experience the value of anti-fascist work was always best determined in close consultation with other radical groups and communities targeted by the far right. In “Death to the Klan” and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US (It’s Going Down, July 26, 2016) there is a useful review of such efforts in Portland, Oregon during the late 1980s and 1990s.

“…[groups] like the Red and Anarchist SkinHeads (RASH) and the SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPs) found themselves in frequent battles with neo-fascists converging on Portland. A group called Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) activated not just to beat back the onslaught of skinheads, but to transform racial consciousness in Portland. They used the strategies developed by ARA [Anti Racist Action] to expose and shame skinheads wherever they showed their faces, getting them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments. However, when skinheads began to harass local members of the community, attacking their houses and cars, CHD devised a decentralized community self-defense strategy.”

In the same article an old Portland comrade of mine, M. Treloar, is interviewed by It’s Going Down activists and elaborates:

“There were several situations where our people who had concealed weapons were confronted by groups of boneheads and either pulled the weapon or made it clear that they were armed and the boneheads backed off…There is no doubt in my mind that in several instances they would have been attacked, since we had people who were taking down car license plate numbers, staking out houses or infiltrating gatherings.”

“The CHD mobilized to form a media defense position, which helped generate positive public opinion….What’s notable is again the people who attacked the boneheads after a certain point did very little time, and were generally hailed as heroes in the community…”

From very early on the work of the Coalition for Human Dignity in Portland, Oregon (I was a founding member) targeted the social base of neo-fascism: white nationalism and the Christian Right. This definition intentionally cut across class lines–rendering racist reaction as neither the exclusive rotted fruit of the ruling class (capitalism releasing fascist antibodies to protect itself) nor principally the unresolved grievances of a white working class left behind by captialist development (two fairly typical myopic explanations of the re-emergence of the far-right.)

Back then, much as today, the issues of choice for far-rightists were anti-black and anti-latino racism and homophobia. It should be noted that at this time (1980s-1990s) the two main political parties and all statist anti-hate groups (SPLC, ADL, etc.), scrupulously avoided homophobia as a political issue and did not include bigoted elements of the Christian right nor anti-immigrant groups within their definition of ‘hate groups’. It was radical LGBTQ and fight-the-right activists who pushed them to do so by being more effective than they ever could be. But, nonetheless, organizing in the early nineties had to contend with the routine dismissals of the Christian Right as backwoods hicks, neo-Nazis as cults and criminals and racist skinheads as yet another counter-cultural youth rebellion, all destined to pass–if they hadn’t already–into the dustbin of history. But they didn’t, and neither did we. So many premature obituaries of the Paleo-conservatives and the Christian Right have been issued and reissued since then that it is staggering to consider not only their continued relevance today but their central role in the Trump electoral victory, and how spectacularly wrong those analysts were about their political prospects.

Many months after Trump’s victory, in a series of articles for Catalyst, Jacobin and New Left Review one of the most astute Marxist analysts today, Mike Davis, finally got around to noting the confluence of white nationalism and the Christian Right in Trump’s victory.  That it took so long for the socialist left to make this observation is disturbing and highlights the fact that if anti-fascists lack the theoretical sophistication of New Left Review contributors, they more than make up for it by actually fighting fascism and capitalism, rather than just writing about it, after the fact.

On the other hand, if antifa groups want to have a say in how to oppose fascism, theoretical clarity is certainly important. The reason the best anti-fascist fighters have always come from socialist, anarchist and communist traditions is because they understood the first principle of anti-fascism: fascism is our mortal enemy, and must be fought.

Saying as much need not always involve alliances with liberals and conservatives that necessarily mean capitulation to those forces. If one has a decisive advantage in intelligence, it can be used to establish the political parameters of such alliances or agreements. If, however, antifa groups do not have an ‘intelligence capacity’ they will cede the right to effectively fight fascism, and thereby protect communities under attack, to others. That right, by the way, is earned; sometimes in a dumpster.