NATASHA LENNARD
Natasha Lennard is a contributing writer for The Intercept, and her work appears regularly in the New York Times, Nation, Esquire, Vice, Salon, and the New Inquiry, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research and co-authored Violence: Humans in Dark Times (2018) with Brad Evans. Her book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, was first published by Verso in 2019 and will soon be republished in a new edition. It explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalisation of political dissent, the myths of radical sex and the ghosts in our lives.
Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Victor Jeffreys
Thomas Roueché How do you see your appeal to a “non-fascist life” in January 2021, in the midst of a second wave of Coronavirus lockdowns and the last days of the Trump government? Your conception of “being numerous” seems well attuned to some of the responses to Covid-19, mutual-aid organising, for example, but what lessons has the left learned from the pandemic?
Natasha Lennard The notion of “non-fascist life” I explore in my book suggests that we need to be attentive to the various ways fascistic practices, habits and hierarchies permeate life under capitalism. It goes beyond that (tired) question of whether Trumpism fits the classical definition of “fascism”. I’m more interested in the fascism and fascisms that manifest in oppressive and paranoid assemblages of our society and politics, and which certainly laid the conditions for a Trump presidency, but are not limited to it. This seems to me as crucial as ever in early 2021: we can be relieved at Trump and his ghouls leaving the White House, which is a blow to the excesses of fascist organising in the US being represented in the head of state. But any contentment should be muted: we need to grasp that fascism in this country was neither undone with the unseating of Trump, nor is it simply a question of battling far-right organisations and individuals. Its shock troops and structures, to say nothing of its core constituencies, remain firmly on the scene. Last summer saw the most powerful rebellions in half a century, the uprisings catalysed by George Floyd’s execution. They may have erupted in the Trump era, but they took aim at a racist fascism that is far older, and all too overlooked by a liberal commentariat fixated on Trumpian “norm busting”. As such, the uprisings for Black life and liberation clarified the scope and shape of contemporary American fascism and anti-fascism in a way never accomplished by preceding debates around Trump, his supporters and policies. In previous writing on the issue, while insisting that Trump did not bring fascism to this country, I too failed to emphasise the anti-Blackness at the heart of American fascism’s operations: namely, the extension of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. I hope that my new additions to the paperback edition do a better job of reckoning with this, written as they were in the wake of the uprisings. In the midst of this pandemic, new urgency attends old questions about, in the words of late poet George Oppen from whom I took my book title, “the meaning of being numerous”. Many of us have considered anew at which junctions, through which quotidian flows, our breaths and spits mingle and our individual bodies reveal their porousness. The determinations of racial capitalism have left little ambiguity as to who gets forced to work in perilous proximity and left without care to die. Yet the Black-led rebellions last summer were an unparalleled lesson in how we must press together with ferocity against the white-supremacist necropolitics of the now. This is true, too, of the mutual-aid networks that have sprung up where young and able-bodied people are providing food and medical necessities to their elderly and infirm neighbours. These networks of mutual aid and community care are hardly thorns in the side of capital, but for now, they fill gaps where the state and market are failing and at their best, transcend the ethos of charity and recognise how our current system designates certain lives as disposable, while organising towards liberation from that system. This is life-affirming resistance in the face of an unbroken history of state violence.
TR The events of 6 January clearly bring a lot of the issues you’ve covered over the last decade into sharp relief – not least the “Nazi punching” with which you started your book. To what extent do you see these recent events as a result of a liberal inability to take white supremacy seriously?
NL In the same way as the vile events at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017, I think 6 January really exposed the far right for what it is: messy, foolish and conspiracy-addled, but at the same time deeply dangerous and willing to kill for the white-supremacist ends that truly drive it. Of course, blame must primarily be laid at the feet of Trump and his bootlickers for inciting and emboldening his racist base, and Fox News for its years of white-supremacist myth-making, for which reporting correctly on who won the election does not absolve them. But yes, liberal hands are not clean here. Years of deadly racist violence, carried out by both right-wing vigilantes, immigration authorities and the police were met by liberal centrists with an intolerable tolerance. It was liberal media organs with their absurd “horseshoe” theory of politics, which consistently failed to harshly oppose the far right, while baselessly condemning left-wing and Black-liberation fighters as being somehow equally as violent as the white supremacists desirous of genocide. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook have, until very recently, allowed Trump and his allies’ dangerous hate speech and disinformation to flourish. It should not have taken the storming of the US Capitol for this to change. White supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73% of extremist murders in the US in the past decade.
TR Indeed, some have argued that liberal anti-fascism functions as a means of disciplining the left. It was interesting to see centrist pundits use the events as a way of scoring points against defunding the police, for example. What are the consequences for any form of dissent in the fallout of 6 January? Do you think the left has cause to worry under the Biden administration? You wrote about the J20 trials, which supposedly targeted “bad protesters”. There seems to be a tension between those who celebrate the arrests and incarceration of the people who stormed the capital on 6 January, and those who worry about the implications of an expansion of the surveillance state, or a Patriot Act 2.0, for dissent. Do you see that as a meaningful tension?
NL Since liberal anti-fascism only really countenances fascism when it arrives in the form of a regime, it fails to reckon with the fascisms that exist quite happily alongside their vaunted liberal democracies. It was the Black Panthers, after all, who used the term “anti-fascism” to describe their class and cross-race anti-imperialist politics – and liberals had no problem disciplining the Panthers in their time, and denigrating their memory now. In the same way, #Resistance liberals would identify as anti-fascist through their opposition to Trump and their horror at 6 January, but fail to see the fascism inherent in US policing, carcerality and border violence. There is certainly an irony in liberals looking at 6 January and thinking the problem was one of too few and underfunded police. We know there are ample, overly funded police in DC and everywhere willing and able to shut down left-wing and Black-liberation protests at the drop of a hat – we saw it all summer. On Trump’s inauguration day – J20 – I took part in the confrontational anti-fascist black-bloc march, which I write about in the book, too. A number of chain stores and bank windows were smashed. Unlike what we saw on 6 January, J20 protesters were met with tight flanks of militarised riot police with batons and pepper spray. Within an hour of the march’s first steps, almost half of the participants – over 200 people – were trapped on a freezing corner behind heavy police lines. Those arrested faced bogus riot charges, which did not stand up in court but could have meant decades in prison. I’m hardly the first to note the double standards in the policing of the far-right and white supremacists that certainly made the Capitol Hill riot possible. Equally, the 6 January crowd itself was absolutely teeming with off-duty law-enforcement officers! I also agree with many on the left who have warned against the Biden administration’s stated plans to take on right-wing extremism through a strategy of domestic counterterrorist law enforcement. Of course, any such apparatus is likely to be used in future against Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, immigrants, the left and other groups the state has historically deemed ideological enemies. While a shift away from the Trump administration’s blustering and dangerous focus on anti-fascists, leftists, and Black-liberation fighters would be welcome, it would be foolish and unempirical to treat the state’s law-enforcement apparatus as an ally. The conflict between anti-racist anti-fascists, white supremacists, and law enforcement is rightly described by some anti-fascist theorists as a “three-way fight”.
TR For some, Biden’s inauguration represents the apotheosis of liberal America, a sense that centrism has won the argument. Where does that leave the left today? Do you see cause for hope?
NL In terms of the highest echelons of electoralism, yes, centrist powers won the day. Biden has been inaugurated, while the much-loved Bernie Sanders watches on in meme-worthy mittens. But even in terms of parliamentary gains, the left is in a far better position than it was under Obama. Democratic Socialists have representatives not only in DC, but in state houses around the country. Of course, the balance of power remains far, far from the left. But we are seeing a major and important upsurge in labour organising – from teachers to nurses to Amazon warehouse workers – in part triggered by the devastations of the pandemic and its grim reminder that it is a feature, not a bug of capitalism that it depends on human life as exploitable labour. Following decades of anti-union labour laws in the US, major legislation is being considered in Congress, which would overturn a number of anti-worker Supreme Court decisions. Biden’s success has not foreclosed ongoing struggle from the left; it is the terrain of struggle now. Above all, we have in the last year witnessed the most powerful and largest uprisings in a generation. It’s the most widespread, and even mainstreamed, reckoning with the very nature of policing and the carceral state I’ve ever seen. There is only hope for the left, and for non-fascist life, in the continued abolitionist struggle against racial capitalism. ◉