---------- Forwarded message --------- From: William Robinson <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 2:55 AM Subject: My Latest: "BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE" - united front against fascism To: william robinson <[email protected]> (Please excuse the double posting for those who read my Facebook blog: I normally do not send to this list serve commentaries that I post on that blog but I make an exception in this case) Dear friends, Some of you are new to this listserve. I send occasional articles and commentaries (about 10 per year) mostly my own writing, most of them in English and some in Spanish. *We are all inundated with emails and I will absolutely not be offended if you ask me to take you off this list.* Algunos de ustedes son nuevos a esta lista. Envío unos 10 artículos y comentarios al año, la mayoría en inglés y algunos en español. Sé que somos inundados por correos y en absoluto no estaré ofendido si prefiere le quité de la lista. * My Facebook blog page is https://www.facebook.com/WilliamIRobinsonSociologist/ <https://www.facebook.com/WilliamIRobinsonSociologist/>. * ----------------- BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE: William I. Robinson Racist police, as foul and criminal as they are, are but an extension of the capitalist state. They exist to defend property from the propertyless, to enforce the power of capital and the rich over the poor and dispossessed majority who in the United States come disproportionately from racially oppressed communities. Behind the eruption of righteous rage over the murder of George Floyd is mass unemployment, escalating inequality, the marginality of tens of millions of people thrown into the ranks of surplus labor, intensified levels of exploitation, spreading hunger, immiseration, insecurity, and death, all spewed up by a global capitalism that accepts no restraint on its predation. I have been warning since the mid-2000s about the dangers of a 21st century fascism and global police state in response to the crisis of capitalism and rebellion from below. Global capitalism is arguable now in the worst crisis in its history. Fascist forces that bring together predatory transnational capital with reactionary and repressive power in the state (including the state’s armed bodies) and a fascist mobilization in civil society are on the rise worldwide. Trump, himself a transnational capitalist, a racist, and a fascist, is taking advantage of the protests over the murder of George Floyd to bring this project to a new level, inciting from the White House itself the fascist mobilization in civil society and threatening a qualitative escalation of the police state. There are agent provocateurs. The state may use them, now or at some future point, to declare martial law and intensify repression, both legal and martial. As is now well known, the new brownshirts – a reference to the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing during the years leading up to the fascist takeover – in the white nationalist militia, the Nazi and Klan groups, anti-immigrant organization, the “Boogaloos,” the Patriot and anti-lockdown movements, among an expanding litany of far-right and Alt-Right groups, are heavily armed and mobilizing for confrontation in near-perfect consort with the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, which long since has captured that party and turned it into one of utter reaction. The social order is coming apart at the seams but a fascist takeover is far from inevitable. We urgently need a united front against fascism that places ant-racism and anti-capitalism at its center and that seeks to mount a revolutionary challenge to capitalist state power. The current uprising, to the extent that it helps to radicalize the new generation of young people leading the protests, may contribute to a critical accumulation of forces from below that could push us further in the direction. Here (attached) is my 2019 article on Trump and the threat of 21st century fascism: William I. Robinson Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies Affiliated Faculty, Latin American and Iberian Studies Affiliated Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies University of California-Santa Barbara web page: www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson photo web page: www.flickr.com/photos/wirobinson Facebook blog page: https://www.facebook.com/williamirobinsonsociologist Amazon author's page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001HD35GA -- P2P Foundation: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net <http://p2pfoundation.net> - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: ; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens Curation of news on p2p/commons developments: https://www.facebook.com/groups/p2p.open/