Fascism is a threat to all life on earth, and can be defined as a set of right-wing ultra-nationalist ideas characterised by forced suppression of opposition, and rigid command and order of society invested in the power of finance capital. Its political ideas, movement, and regimes are inextricably linked to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and clung to historically by the wealthy afraid of the ‘proletarianisation’ of the poor and socialism. Fascism isn’t only made up of reaction and fear, it has a clear intellectual history that makes moral and biological claims to natural leadership, survival of the fittest, and might is right. Fascist philosophy has justified slave trades and genocide through ethno-supremacist ideologies such as White Supremacy, Nazism, Zionism, Hindutva, Han Chauvinism etc. Fascism today is disguised and effective through the State and their prison, police, military and intelligence arms.

During times where the cost of living is high and people struggling to make ends meet, fascists recruit and do well with fear tactics to secure their support. By scapegoating Indigenous, poor, migrants, Jews, trans people, fascists argue that ‘traditional’ values will fall, western society will collapse, and wealth will be pulled from those who ‘rightfully’ hold it. Whether the upper, middle, working classes believe in a rightful order of elites or not, these groups absorb a perceived or real fear of communism and can side with fascists. Even marginalised people can harbour and perpetuate conservative, regressive ideas and actions, due to people’s own cultural backgrounds or adopted from foreign cultures. For example, people may come to fascist ideas from forming political or emotional defence mechanisms against their own hardship, also to actually assert dominance against another culture or class so they can improve their own social status or capital.

Fascism in our context has found inroads and success electorally and through building reactionary movements. Fused with conservative politics and capitalist business interests, fascism delivers ‘much needed’ authoritarianism — tight border control, excessive surveillance and interference in everyday life, anti-protest laws justified to prevent ‘terrorist threats’. Ecofascists blame immigration for environmental degradation. Gender fascism looks like debates on the ‘existence’ of trans people, accusations of grooming, attempts to remove reproductive and sex worker rights. The antisemitic far-right covid pandemic deniers along with liberals have enabled ‘covid-normal’. Nazis on our shores recruit out of these reactionary social movements concerned about so-called threats to ‘Australian values’ and ‘the family unit’. In this way fascism requires false narratives, pseudoscience and the dehumanisation of people.

Fascism can dress itself in red too. Happy to wave in authoritarian governments with communist trimmings in order to protect itself against larger imperialist threats. The way Stalinists are often yelling about the atrocities committed by imperialist powers, but still justifying that power should be centralised in their hands. Stalinists are primed to the threat of America, but when they’ve seized power, these states have historically murdered Anarchists for suggesting that power should be wielded in common by regular and working people, not by a state of elites. While American Imperialism is a real threat to world democracy, this still doesn’t justify authoritarianism as a response. It justifies the organised masses of working class people the world over forming structures of genuine class power, especially the Global South.

Any serious organisation existing in these times must take a hard and clear stance against fascism — whether it be the pandemic eugenics willing to sacrifice the disabled and immunocompromised for ‘freedoms’ of the able-bodied, or literal Nazis who recruit from right-wing media propaganda. We aim to organise serious opposition to local fascist groups organising in our context, amongst communities threatened by their existence. As an org that takes seriously the emancipation of the Global South, critically analysing the roots and consequences of fascism amongst marginalised people is crucial for strategising against international fascism. The way we do this is to build a serious militant organisation with serious security, as fighting fascism doesn’t just mean Nazis on the street, but fighting against an ever-increasing genocidal national fascist security state that increasingly crushes dissent and democratic protest.