Right-wing marches are little more than angry parades, but they are effective recruitment systems designed to attract interest for growth, writes Tom Tanuki.
ON OCTOBER 19, there are counter-rallies against nationalists and their white supremacist directors who are, as the flyers say, 'Marching for Australia'. I want all anti-racists to come to our events — and by that I really mean: working class people of all races who have an inkling that something is at stake when a wave of nationalism rises.
But what for? Why come to the rallies, I mean?
It should really be up for discussion.
There's a standard protest cliché that if we outsize the racists' rally, then we shall "win in Melbourne" again. Well, I've seen moments of three people standing up against a racist rally that have done greater damage than other moments where there were 3,000 — so, numbers really aren't everything, you know. (You should come down and lend your presence because it makes your like-minded comrades safer, not to "win in Melbourne".)
The standard rhetoric deployed by some of my comrades when promoting moments like this is that we need to come out to "build a working-class movement to stand against the far right". I agree, of course — I suppose I wouldn't have spent nearly ten years promoting anti-racist rallies otherwise.
But I don't think there are many people who really believe a standalone rally as a spectacle achieves that goal.
At this stage, we've all seen several waves crash to the shore in the form of protest movements that say a lot very loudly but don't seem to exert much effort away from placard-waving.
As Mark Fisher observed of 2000s-era anti-capitalist protests in Capitalist Realism:
'...since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organisation, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met. Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism...'
I wrote extensively in this column space on the reliance on gauche spectacle by the anti-lockdown movement, and the way that that spectacle seemed to irresistibly melt into merchandise sales.
Similar could be said, and has been, of XR's systemisation of protest spectacle, essentially consisting of feeding eager young climate activists into a justice system meat grinder with their bulk lie-ins, tie-ins, die-ins and shoe-ins. The incorrect bet was that there would be more young people than the system could handle.
Most modern rallies have devolved into media-harvesting spectacles, unhooked from the now-obscured threat meant to be built into a demonstration:
These numbers of people are a demonstration of the bargaining power we will wield when we go on to take further action, such as a strike.
An example from the cradle of white Australian nationalism that birthed the March for Australia itself.
It's not the National Socialist Network's (NSN) spectacles that are of concern to real anti-fascists, so much as the effective recruitment system they've built to grow with the interest they attract from resultant media promotion of those spectacles.
The marches themselves, on the other hand, really are just angry parades. They are heat and shouting and racist bluster about Indians, demographic replacement and white genocide. What they will definitely do is physically hurt a scattering of non-white Australians along the way, just as Reclaim did — an outcome all big racist movements affect.
But they'll die out, these marches. It's only grouplets like the NSN, with their movement-building systems set in place, that stand to benefit from what the Marches "achieve" before they fizzle out.
More broadly, I think we're in a post-liberalism race of competing ideologies which are setting about preparing for various system collapses. I mean ecological systems collapses (climate disaster), food systems collapses (same), civilisational collapses (first America, later the world), and so on. We can all see them coming. Some a little more clearly than others, but we can all see them.
The race is run by those of us who believe in collectivism — be it socialism, communism, or at least a kind of working-class utilitarianism or egalitarianism. We are racing against people who favour ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism, patrimonialism, religious fundamentalism and so on.
My view is that they are edging ahead of us.
One reason is because a scarcity climate favours the fascists' dishonest, dangerous big promises of the trains running on time. Another is because they are very well-organised, in real life. They have created better spaces than us to meet and organise together.
So I say: consider a rally like these a space to meet your comrades, past, present and, crucially, future.
I did not give a fuck about having the opportunity to yell at fascists at the last March for Australia. They put delusional old ladies from the sticks with hand flags in our way, and it felt like it achieved little.
What I really valued was some of the people whose hands I shook. I appreciated the people who I knew would have my back. I appreciated some of the plans I got to make with new faces there.
Rejecting nationalism is not a worldview in and of itself. I have always viewed my anti-fascism as but a strategic auxiliary to a healthy left. Not everyone needs to squander their energies like I do in understanding the latest trends among our political opposition — and in fact, I think not many aside from me even should do it, because we should be building healthier, viable alternatives for our grim future instead of obsessing over arseholes.
But when the racists show up, we must show up boldly to let them know the town square, literal and figurative, is never theirs alone. And my view is that no matter where you are, you need people who will face down what's coming with you.
There is defence training happening, but you have to meet and be trusted by people to find out about it. There is a lot of organisation occurring, and many ways you can help — but you have to meet and be trusted by people to find out about it.
So go out and meet people. And keep us all safe.
Links to 19 October rallies can be found here.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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