The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, including an attack by a neo-Nazi that resulted in 19 injuries and the death of Heather Heyer, brought into focus the danger of white supremacy. It reminded Americans of the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States.

It also catapulted resistance to white nationalism into the limelight, resistance which has taken many forms: Black Lives Matter; INCITE!; subdivisions of socialist organizations; Refuse Fascism, sponsored by Revolutionary Communist Party organization, and leftist parties like Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Each has worked tirelessly to resist not only physical displays of racism but systematic abuses perpetuated by the state.

I spoke to members of the Workers World Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Democratic Socialists of America, and Refuse Fascism about the ongoing struggle against a system that actively seeks to further marginalize a number of communities, and destroy a growing left movement. They outline not only what a leftist response to white supremacy should look like but also why white nationalist groups will not simply crumble and disappear if they are ignored.

Democratic Socialists of America Jewish Solidarity Caucus (JSC)

Lane Silberstein, 29-years-old

NYC; member of DSA JSC, and IfNotNow

Emily Lever, 24-years-old

NYC; member of DSA JSC, and the Socialist Feminist Working Group

Chamseddine: After Charlottesville and other efforts by white supremacists to mobilize, do you believe that anything has changed in terms of the left’s response to their violence?

Silberstein: The JSC believes in self-defense, direct action, and materialist analysis. However—and this might be a dissatisfying answer—the JSC also comes together with liberal Jewish groups to form coalitions against fascism. The left will have to really think about when and how to organize alongside liberal groups, but not be afraid to call them to task. DSA is holding rallies with [International Socialist Organization], [Industrial Workers Of the World] and [Movement For Black Lives], et al, in attempts to unite the left; but JSC exists in part to radicalize liberal Jews and inform them of Jewish socialist history and praxis [which is enacting or putting theory into practice].

Lever: There is even more of a sense of urgency than there was before and a renewed understanding that the left needs to set aside ideological differences and pull together. DSA may be the largest socialist organization in the country, but 25,000 members is still tiny in the grand scheme of things.

The left needs to both grow, including by calling to action progressives who are on the precipice of being leftists but might not know how to get involved, and present a united front. For me and those around me, that might mean gathering and talking to DSA members who have a tendency to punch left.

Personally, I also think the left needs to think hard about self-defense. There’s a diversity of tactics people can adopt, from secure communication and getting members not to shoot their mouths off online to having security at public events and, where appropriate and well-considered, open carrying.

Chamseddine: What does a modern leftist response to white supremacy look like?

Silberstein: First, I think it begins with education. DSA has political education committees that organize readings, and we have been centering work by feminists and black women, like the Combahee River Collective.

I actually don’t think it’s per se a problem that DSA is so white and male. White males need to be organized, and we need to be socialists. We just can’t be ignorant socialists. And then we need to turn this theory into praxis, and recognize that if our work isn’t benefiting people at the intersection of different forms of oppression, what good are we doing?

Lever: [We need] one, political education that is grounded in theory and history but designed to teach comradely, anti-racist, socialist, feminist behavior in day-to-day life. Two, Direct services to working-class communities of color that fill the gaps left by capitalism, neoliberalism, and planned neglect. Three, coalitions with leftist groups that are people of color-led and specifically oriented toward racial justice.

Chamseddine: How have you and your organization worked to challenge public perception when it comes to fighting white supremacists? We’ve seen people take a passive tone when it comes to confronting them, especially in the streets, so what can we do to challenge this?

Silberstein: One of the reasons our caucus exists is to push back against members of the Jewish community who ignore our history and seek to compare fascists to anti-fascists.

The legacy of the Jewish Labor Bund informs a lot of our work. These radical men and women, under witness of their comrades, would swear an oath of life or death in their commitment to defeating capitalism and fascism. They would be imprisoned by the Czar and, later, hunted by Nazis.

Members of the Jewish Solidarity Caucus will never forget that a non-Jewish woman gave her life protesting neo-Nazis. Heather Heyer joins the ranks of martyrs of world-historical struggles. She paid an ultimate sacrifice and yet there are people in our community who want to make these comparisons between fascists and antifa (Greenblatt of the ADL, Peter Beinart). So it is crucial for this caucus to stand up and give this historical Jewish socialist perspective.

Chamseddine: What makes the leftist position on challenging white supremacy different than the mainstream American liberal position?

Silberstein: In my opinion, there is a connection between the inability of liberal members of our community to present a positive vision for a better world and the emergence of the far right. Liberals simply don’t have the political drive to improve material conditions, which would undercut the rise of right wing populism.

We formed this caucus because the mainstream Jewish community is uninterested in challenging the false idols of capitalism and nationalism. The complicity of liberals in failing to challenge Zionism, for example, I see as connected to the rise of extremist groups, like the JDL [Jewish Defense League]. Because at the end of the day, liberal Jews see Zionism as the only legitimate form of political Jewish agency.

Liberals have this in common with the far right. We fight back with solidarity and internationalism.

The JSC also understands that anti-semitism is a crucial mechanism within capitalism. C.L.R. James wrote about this, a form of colonialism within Europe. It’s a shame Jewish liberals don’t get it.

Additionally, if you’ve followed recent work by Jewish Voice for Peace, they’re highlighting the role that groups like the ADL have in collaborating with the police both here and in Israel/Palestine. Liberals aren’t interested in exposing that because they don’t think there’s a problem with the police in the first place.

Lever: Liberals tend to not want to see the root causes of oppression—well, some of them do, but all they’ll do about it is call their senators, show up to rallies, donate money, and vote for the lesser evil. Someone needs to do these things, of course, but leftists, by definition, think of oppression structurally and understand that incremental reforms will never change the fundamental character of oppressive institutions. They can state the problem in what I believe is a more persuasive and clear-cut way.

While leftists reject incrementalism, many still think reform and revolution are indissociable aspects of the struggle. In order to improve material conditions today, we fight for transformative reforms that challenge capitalism and white supremacy (though we might disagree among ourselves about what’s really transformative).

That said, a lot of leftists started out as liberals, and more generally, we are all steeped in the alienating morass of neoliberalism, individualism, and performativity. We can’t necessarily go around thinking we’ve got it all figured out, and we’re nothing like those milquetoast liberals because we don’t always embrace tactics as radical as our stated beliefs either. But we’re getting there.

Chamseddine: What can people do to show solidarity with comrades facing legal repercussions?

Silberstein: A lot of the people who are just now getting into activism have never had any interactions with the police and are really afraid of the legal system and of running afoul of it. A good way to get these people’s feet wet is get them to participate in jail support and pack the courtroom at comrades’ arraignments and trials (which is of course a good thing to do in general).

Setting up bail funds is already happening but should be more common. If a comrade is in jail, watching their kids or helping out their family in any other way they need (particularly if the comrade is losing wages by being in jail) should happen in a concerted way. I also really loved the action people took in Durham where thousands turned themselves in for toppling the Confederate statue in an “I am Spartacus” kind of moment.

Workers World Party

Devin, 23-years-old

Florida; Workers World Party candidate member, president of World Party candidate member, president of Strive (Social Trans Initiative, Pensacola), Director of Operations of Florida Transgender Alliance.

Taryn Fivek, 32-years-old

NYC; member of Workers world Party, and the International Action Center

Nate Peters, 31-years-old

NYC; member of Workers World Party, People’s Power Assemblies, and NYC Shut It Down

Chamseddine: After Charlottesville and other efforts by white supremacists to mobilize, do you believe that anything has changed in terms of the left’s response to their violence?

Devin: Yes. The left is [recognizing] the unhelpful practice of strict sectarianism in organizing against fascist violence and mobilizing together to fight off Nazis and white supremacists. Of course, “left unity” is problematic in that it can easily ignore working class unity or proletarian unity (and it often does), but when Nazis and white supremacists come out in masses, the oppressed masses (us), must rise together to fight back.

Fivek, Peters: We are unafraid. We are strategic. We realize it’s not just 500 racists but the thousands of cops mobilized to protect them like they were in Charlottesville.

We are up against the greatest threat to humanity, the largest and most deadly imperialist state in history. Our strength is in our righteous anger and in the masses who have our back.

It’s one thing to go to a rally carrying a gun, like the right wing did, but quite another to spit in the face of a Klansman holding an AR-15. The right are cowards, and hide behind the police or inside a 4,000-pound hunk of metal they slam into unarmed anti-racist protesters. We will continue in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, Korryn Gaines, Malcolm X, Sandra Bland, Fred Hampton, John Brown, Gabriel Prosser and—of course—Heather Heyer. We are on the right side of history.

Chamseddine: What does a modern leftist response to white supremacy look like?

Devin: The action in Durham, along with Bree Newsome’s action in 2015, are what is necessary now at the highest stage of countering white supremacy.

At the lowest stage, rallies, marches, and vigils can be great and comforting in times when we lose a comrade or a victim of senseless, white supremacist violence, but it can’t stop there. We must escalate the action and commit ourselves to civil disobedience wherever we can.

If the fuckers in the government are going to drag their feet on removing monuments or removing white supremacists, then we must tread where there is foot-dragging and where there is oppression and do it ourselves.

Fivek, Peters: It can be anything from a Black Lives Matter button to the sort of courageous and righteous action we saw in Durham on Monday. Communists took down that altar to white supremacy, a communist Black queer woman in particular, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

To struggle against white supremacy, we’re going to have to struggle against the system that gave us prisons, killer cops, Jim Crow, ICE prisons, and imperialist wars against black, brown and indigenous people abroad. We’re going to have to drag the whole damn system down and replace it with something built on justice, not genocide.

Chamseddine: Has your organization faced any backlash from the police? Have any members been specifically targeted for raids? If not, have you all prepared yourselves for this?

Devin: Workers World Party – Durham Branch, has suffered an onslaught of state-sanctioned surveillance and harassment since Takiyah Thompson’s revolutionary act of bringing the statue down in Durham. Members’ homes were raided and many were arrested, but the Party’s disciplined approach and response to continued police brutality has allowed for all members arrested to be freed. And there is now a movement to have all charges dropped against Takiyah, as well as other members arrested.

Fivek, Peters: Members of our organization have had to deal with arrests, raids, and outrageous charges for doing what I figure to be a public service. The sanitation department in Durham should pay them for their time. While these charges are serious, we have millions of people on our side who smiled when they saw the video of the statue come down in Durham. It would help if they chipped in some money for the defense efforts.

Chamseddine: How have you and your organization worked to challenge public perception when it comes to fighting white supremacists? We’ve seen people take a passive tone when it comes to confronting them, especially in the streets, so what can we do to challenge this?

Devin: Workers World Party has worked in the struggle against white supremacy for over half a century. WWP has taken to the streets time and time again to fight back against white supremacy, fascism, and racism; to unite the struggle against all of these oppressive factors.

Additionally, WWP has avoided the plague that is liberalism and now, neoliberalism as well, which many leftist groups have not been able to avoid.

One of the biggest problems among the masses is that many do not recognize that liberalism and neoliberalism are just as complicit in white supremacy as conservative ruling class systems. Liberalism promotes a message of passivity. It allows the working class to be trodded on and for oppressive systems to continue. Workers World Party has continuously avoided this plague.

Fivek, Peters: The Workers World Party has a long anti-fascist and anti-racist tradition. Our first action in New York City was against the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, and we ran him out of town. Members of the party mortgaged their houses to send money to Robert F. Williams.

When the Black Panther Party was under attack from the state, WWP was the only Marxist tendency to really defend them. People in the movement today don’t know this in relation to the Panthers. We are strongly against the death penalty and worked tirelessly to get Mumia off death row. The party organized the massive marches on Washington against the Iraq War. Our party’s fundamental analysis of Marxism, vis a vis a comrade named Sam Marcy, is against white supremacy. Our actions in Durham are a proud continuation of that legacy.;

We believe strongly that white supremacy will not fade away on its own, that it must be confronted and smashed by the resistance of the masses. I think the best way to challenge the passive liberal response to open white supremacy is to lead by example. When we confronted the Klan and neo-Nazis in the streets of Charlottesville, when we pulled down the Confederate monument in Durham, we set a clear example of how to fight white supremacy.

Chamseddine: What makes the leftist position on challenging white supremacy different than the mainstream American liberal position?

Fivek, Peters: The liberal position on white supremacy is that it will wither away if left alone and ignored, and that the free speech rights of white supremacists should be protected because their positions would be rejected in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ if they are allowed to express them openly.

The liberal position on white supremacy is that it exists as a character flaw, as a bad taste joke. They don’t really acknowledge that it is part and parcel of the system we live in, part and parcel of capitalism, not just in this country, but across the world. They don’t acknowledge the connection between the so-called criminal justice system and racism, or the connection between racism and capitalism. They want to keep it compartmentalized. They want to defend capitalism or the system of governance we have now, and they don’t want to admit that we’ll have to do away with capitalism to do away with racism.

The leftist position rejects all of these points. White supremacy grows, whether we ignore it or not, and needs to be met head on if we are to defeat it. Furthermore, oppressed people have the right to defend themselves against white supremacy by any means they deem necessary. We should do everything we can to restrict the speech of white supremacists because hate speech does not exist in an abstract marketplace of ideas. It serves as incitement to very real acts of racist violence. We work to expose racism as an inherent aspect of capitalism, not a moral shortcoming that can be reformed away with laws or elections.

Chamseddine: What can people do to show solidarity with comrades facing legal action?

Fivek, Peters: Call the Durham DA at 919-808-3010 and demand all charges relating to the toppling of the Confederate monument be dropped and that no more arrests or raids be made in connection to the case.

Support Takiyah Thompson, who is unable to work due to concerns for her safety by donating via Venmo or PayPal. You can also donate to the Durham Solidarity Center bond fund. If you’d like to support the party directly so we can keep doing all this great work, you can sign up for our resistance fund on Patreon.

Refuse Fascism

Mark Tinkleman, 30-years-old

Philadelphia; member of Refuse Fascism, supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party

Chamseddine: After Charlottesville and other efforts by white supremacists to mobilize, do you believe that anything has changed in terms of the left’s response to their violence?

Tinkleman: I think the biggest change is concentrated in the clergy statements, including Cornel West’s statement, where many who have harbored only private or theoretical sympathies or been somewhat antagonistic to the notion of self-defense are now embracing it.

One of the other noticeable changes has been the willingness for many who have theoretically embraced radical notions to begin seriously thinking this through beyond notions of just getting ripped for the revolution or organizing their small crews.

In that light, Carl Dix’s statement that what is/was going on in Charlottesville was “the outlines of a new civil war in this country” is really prescient. It’s not just “Antifa” vs the “alt-right,” or even “the left” vs “the right.” Everyone is having to choose a side and it’s on us to connect with and lead those on the side of humanity. This is what Bob Avakian was referring to in his 2005 work, “The Coming Civil War and Re-Polarization for Revolution.”

Chamseddine: What does a modern leftist response to white supremacy look like?

Tinkleman: There’s two parts both of which have their complexities and contradictions and can’t be confused with each other: politically mobilizing people en masse to drive the fascist Trump/Pence regime from power and getting organized for an actual revolution.

Chamseddine: Has your organization faced any backlash from the police? Have any members been specifically targeted for raids? If not, have you all prepared yourselves for this?

Tinkleman: We have been as prepared as possible for this from the get go. The only backlash we faced in the immediate was when we took one of the Charlottesville fascists’ Trump flag to the White House on the way home and burned it right at the gate. We were briefly detained by the Secret Service, but we made clear that we knew our rights and engaged the crowd, who were overall sympathetic, and we were let go. There are videos of this up on the Refuse Fascism Philly Facebook page.

Chamseddine: How have you and your organization worked to challenge public perception when it comes to fighting white supremacists? We’ve seen people take a passive tone when it comes to confronting them, especially in the streets. So what can we do to challenge this?

Tinkleman: What’s needed most now—and this was definitely reinforced by the events in Charlottesville and the events in Boston—is more people with more determination.

At this moment, what is needed is to be able to mobilize truly massive numbers of people, more than we had in Charlottesville, to overwhelm them, and to educate people that this is beyond a question of “white privilege,” as horrendous and pervasive as that is. This is a fight over whether there will be another genocide in this country or not. The tactics of confrontation vs non-confrontation flow out of this. Otherwise, we’re just fronting.

Chamseddine: What makes the leftist position on challenging white supremacy different than the mainstream American liberal position?

Tinkleman: There are many positions on challenging white supremacy amongst people ‘on the left’ and amongst ‘liberals.’ I think there’s something of a category error at work on that question, tbh. It could take dissertation to tease them all apart. In general I don’t think this distinction, as it’s colloquially understood, is very useful or accurate.

Chamseddine: What can people do to show solidarity with comrades facing legal action?

Tinkleman: Come back stronger. When we get arrested for this shit, we need thousands to take our place on the front lines. This is true in normal times but these days it is even more acute.

We have a small window of opportunity before this regime slams shut all possibilities of resistance. On November 4th, Refuse Fascism is calling for a day of mass action across the country which do not stop until our one demand is met: the Trump/Pence regime must go! The fact is that there will be repression. But there is historical precedent for that repression to be turned on its head.

In the movement to drive out the shah of Iran in 1979, each attack against the protesters—arrests, torture, murders—magnified the resistance. They were able to create a political crisis, where their demand started small but on a political and ideological level.

There was literally nothing the rulers could do to stop it from gaining ground exponentially. There is also historical precedent for movements being crushed. The key thing is the ideological and political work to create and meet a crisis head on and give the people broadly the conceptual tools to fight.

Money, too. Honestly, people in our moral universe often shy away from fundraising here, almost as much as they do for other organizing efforts. People need their bail paid. People need to pay their bills and deal with their jobs. They need good lawyers (and the best lawyers, the ones who will fight for us pro-bono usually are not drowning in money so they need whatever we can raise).

The Party for Socialism and Liberation

Alex Munger, 22-years-old

Atlanta, GA; member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation

Eugene Puryear, 31-years-old

Washington D.C.; Party for Socialism and Liberation central committee member, Stop Police Terror Project-DC, author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America

Chamseddine: After Charlottesville and other efforts by white supremacists to mobilize, do you believe that anything has changed in terms of the left’s response to their violence?

Puryear: The most important factor really in terms of analyzing what has changed is the growth of “the left,” broadly defined. At the same time, there is a loose fascist trend trying to cohere as a street movement. Socialist, communist, and other radicals are becoming more numerous within a broader politically charged progressive moment.

Left-wing anti-fascist activity has had a pretty much unbroken existence when fascist movements have tried to rise since the 1930s. So I don’t know if the basic positions and arguments and discussions on tactics have changed in a major way, but the social weight, or if you prefer, influence of varying positions [changed].

There’s also been an emergence of people willing to defend communities against fascists. That’s not new. It’s just both sides are much larger than they have been in some time, and thus more relevant which appears to us as “new.”

Chamseddine: What does a modern leftist response to white supremacy look like?

Puryear: Given the current context, post-Charlottesville, I think that’s a two-part question. A lot of people would read that question and think it was referring to what to do specifically about these white supremacist organizations that we see are clearly willing to aid and abet terrorist activity and engage in street fighting.

Clearly, some element of a response to that has to concern itself with the physical defense of people and places. It also means mobilizing a physically larger presence than fascist forces in explicit displays of opposition to fascism, white supremacy, racism, anti-semitism and bigotry writ large. I think we’ve seen the former begin to emerge in embryonic ways, and the latter manifest itself in the large protest response to the Charlottesville terrorist attack.

However it is clearly much broader than that because the way white supremacy manifests itself in society is variegated. For instance, the way poverty has been racialized for political reasons perpetuates white supremacist logic to masses of people.

This means that fighting white supremacy means deepening our ideological analyses to understand how slavery and genocide and the white supremacist ideology that produced—sharpened by several waves of mass immigration from various parts of the globe—played a role in both the creation of institutions but also of both inter and intra-class hierarchical stratifications based on skin color.

Asking those questions in relationship to struggles for the rights of tenants or the massive violence of the police is key in fighting white supremacy. What unites workers of all backgrounds is that they are exploited, that is they have to work to live. However, the various oppression people face in regards to national origin (“race/ethnicity”), gender-orientation, sexual orientation, or disability mean that workers often experience the same exploitation in unique ways.

As much as a modern movement against white supremacy has to be concerned with defending against the overt terrorist nature of many white supremacist groups, understanding how institutional policy perpetuates racist logic in a way where exploitation is felt disproportionately sharper in some communities as opposed to others is essentially the condition for building any sort of mass working class movement for social rights, like housing, healthcare, and education.

We essentially have to reverse engineer the imperialist system and break down all the elements setup to divide the broad mass of people to perpetuate the power of the ruling class elites.

Munger: First and foremost, recognizing the class character of fascism and white supremacy. This is something lacking in many sectors of left anti-fascist opposition. There is no explicit realization that this is class war.

The overt white supremacists are sometimes treated as “aberrations” or unseemly sectors of the “white working class.” This is liberalism, of course. I see very little recognition of the U.S. empire’s exportation of fascism (recently) to places, such as Ukraine, Venezuela, Libya, Syria.

Myopic understandings of white supremacy as something disconnected from U.S. ruling class practice and ideology aren’t helpful and obscure the class character of white supremacy. A modern leftist response protests just as hard against the U.S. arming fascists in Venezuela and Ukraine as it does against actions of white supremacist organizations here. I, sadly, do not see this.

Chamseddine: Has your organization faced any backlash from the police? Have any members been specifically targeted for raids? If not, have you all prepared yourselves for this?

Puryear: Specifically related to anti-fascist activity, no. In other contexts, yes we have been targeted by the state in various ways, and in some cases this has been publicized. We always remain highly vigilant in this regard.

Munger: Not directly by police, at least recently, to my knowledge. The Alburquerque office of the PSL was attacked twice by fascists that were reportedly at least cordial with the police there, if not bilaterally allied. There hasn’t been a large-scale police raid in a few years. As the PSL Atlanta chapter is still in its infancy, we don’t have an office. sS there is not much that could be raided at the moment. If we expand, we’ll need to prepare.

Chamseddine: How have you and your organization worked to challenge public perception when it comes to fighting white supremacists? We’ve seen people take a passive tone when it comes to confronting them, especially in the streets. So what can we do to challenge this?

Puryear: I think what is most convincing is to remind people what really happened in Charlottesville, and this is something we have tried to do in our publications and public events. A large group of those committed to nonviolence and those concerned with more directly defense-related activities collaborated to create an anti-fascist presence, which ultimately forced the fascists to end their rally and retreat. The terrorist attack came after this retreat by fascists in the face of a growing anti-fascist presence.

Creating a vibrant anti-fascist presence that denies them access to space and control of the narrative can involve a number of facets combined strategically to defend against these violent white supremacist organizations. Charlottesville shows us this.

Munger: I think the best method here is to distribute propaganda and political literature on the subject in areas that we know are anti-white supremacist but may be heavily indoctrinated with milquetoast liberal ideology. Other than this, going to marches and rallies against white supremacy carrying radical signs and pamphlets can help sway the discourse, especially if there are a lot of liberals present.

Chamseddine: What makes the leftist position on challenging white supremacy different than the mainstream American liberal position?

Puryear: I think almost certainly it’s that people on the leftist end of the spectrum see the roots of white supremacy in the rise of capitalism and imperialism and its demise being tied to the dismantling of those systems. Liberals tend to have just an eclectic grab bag of reasons for why there are seemingly permanent “racist attitudes.”

Munger: The principal rupture is the recognition of white supremacy itself. Liberals see white supremacists as perhaps people in Trump’s cabinet, or mad racists with tiki torches, but this is obviously only the tip of the iceberg.

From the perspective of not only marginalized communities in the U.S., but also people in the Global South, every sector of the U.S. state apparatus; in fact, the essence of the United States itself, is white supremacist. This is something liberals will refuse to admit, as they believe “resistance is patriotic” or whatever. “Death to Amerikkka” is a holistic materialist challenge to white supremacy. “Let’s impeach Trump” is not.

Chamseddine: What can people do to show solidarity with comrades facing legal action?

Puryear: People should support all those who are facing legal action for standing up to fascism in particular and also in the most general sense support organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, who defend progressive, anti-fascist and revolutionary organizations.

Munger: Of course, fundraising for legal fees helps, and if they are already incarcerated, visiting them or writing letters helps keep spirits high. Putting together a network of comrades who are legal professionals is a difficult but worthwhile endeavor also.