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Book review: Three Way Fight

Book review: Three Way Fight

The essays collected here outline what being against 21st century fascism — both as it exists inside and outside the State — can and should mean

~ Jay Arachnid ~

The selections from eponymous website threewayfight.org are arranged chronologically rather than thematically, which is a fair enough editorial decision. But it was frustrating to have to wait for more than 50 pages until any concrete attempt to define contemporary fascism is presented. Significantly for the essays collected here, this came from a 2017 document, while the Marxist organisation whose former members contribute the bulk of the material (Sojourner Truth Organization, STO) was founded in 1969 and remained active through the 1980s.

The shortcomings of movement theoreticians who fail to offer more than a few obvious authoritarian characteristics of what gets called “fascism” (with or without hyperbole) are scattered throughout some of the more thoughtful essays and transcribed interviews.

In addition, there is an implicit understanding that the simplistic labeling as “fascist” of any and all opponents of communism and/or anarchism is unhelpful. The other simplistic position that’s rejected is the binary opposition of “the West” — the cartoonish stance of official anti-imperialism which embraces any resistance to Euro-American economic and political hegemony as revolutionary, even when those resistance movements are clearly reactionary.

As the editors say in their introduction, “The project’s … supporters rejected the conventional liberal model that portrayed authoritarian extremists threatening a democratic center, but they also challenged the standard leftist binary that saw fascism and liberalism as arrayed together in defense of capitalism against the working-class left”.

Rather than rely on the instinctive anti-fascism of many radicals who might prefer not to discuss what fascism actually looks like today, and therefore what the fight against it should look like, the essays collected here outline what being against 21st century fascism — both as it exists inside and outside the State — can and should mean.

The existence of an insurgent, anti-law enforcement and sometimes anti-war reactionary fascist movement (or rather, movements) completely escapes the logic of liberal antifascism. Beginning from their experiences from STO and continuing with activities in Anti-Racist Action, many of the people who contribute to Three Way Fight clearly grew frustrated with the lack of an analytical perspective among American antifascists. And it paid off; reading through the selections was far more interesting and enjoyable than reading an endless catalog of self-congratulatory action reports.

That said, there is an unfortunate corollary that comes along with striving for analytical and theoretical rigour: the tendency toward centralisation and hierarchy. As self-conscious Marxists, STO already took these organisational characteristics for granted, would never have considered them to be a problem, and many such assumptions are scattered throughout the collection.

Sadly, self-described anarchists are not immune to this tendency, as can be seen with various uncritical mentions of Love and Rage (1990/91-98); Bring the Ruckus (1997-2002?); the Federation of Revolutionary Anarchist Collectives (FRAC, 2001-06) and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC, 2000-08). Each of these cross-pollinated organisations suffered from the usual drifts toward hierarchy and conformism. One essay, from members of the IWW union’s Atlanta General Defense Committee exhibit this without any hint of irony:

“A mass approach requires a higher level of coordination. If we’re serious about confronting fascism … then we’ll need to get serious about group cohesion, group discipline, and accountability …The movement that we need now has to move beyond … individual, unaccountable behavior.”

Perhaps if I didn’t know the history of the above organisations, I might not find this quotation from the IWW to be troubling. But the history is known, and it features loss of members due to organisational inertia, attrition from simple burn out, interpersonal conflicts that leadership either deny or deem trivial, all the way to public (often acrimonious) resignations and splits.

And judging from the rhetoric still being produced by the current crop of groups deriving — both ideologically and with some of the same people — from the aforementioned outfits, virtually no lessons have been learned from previous failures to create, let alone maintain, formal cadre-based membership mass organisations.

Anarchists are not against organisation, but some ask more questions about it than others. My own experiences as part of both formal and informal organisations has made me sceptical, especially of anarchist organisations that aim for a mass base. Nevertheless, leaving aside the various challenges of how many of the contributors — Marxist and anarchist alike — have decided to organise themselves, Three Way Fight contains plenty to think about and discuss. As such, it’s a valuable addition to the ongoing struggle.


Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism, Ed. Xtn Alexander and Matthew N Lyons (PM Press, 2024). ISBN: 9798887440415, 416 pp


This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal

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