What's the relationship between combating the far right and working for systemic change? What does it mean when fascists intensify racial oppression and patriarchy but also call for the downfall of economic elites or even take up arms against the state? Three way fight politics confront these urgent questions squarely, arguing that the far right grows out of an oppressive capitalist order but is also in conflict with it in real ways, and that radicals need to combat both. The three way fight approach says we need sharper analysis of far-right movements so we can fight them more effectively, and we also need to track ongoing developments within the ruling class, including liberal or centrist efforts to co-opt antifascism as a tool of state repression and system legitimation. This book offers an introduction to three way fight politics, with more than thirty essays, position statements, and interviews from the Three Way Fight website and elsewhere, spanning from the antifascist struggles of the 1980s and 1990s to the political upheavals of the twenty-first century. Over fifteen authors explore a range of topics, such as fascist politics' relationship with patriarchy and settler colonialism, Tom Metzger's 'Third Position' (anticapitalist) fascism, conflict within the business community over the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump administration's shifting relationship with the organized far right. Many of the writings address issues of political strategy, such as tensions between radicals and liberals within the reproductive rights movement and the George Floyd rebellion, video gaming as an arena of political struggle, and the importance (and challenges) of approaching antifascist organizing in ways that are militant, community based, and nonsectarian.
Since first becoming a part of the revolutionary and anarchist youth movements of the late 1980s,
Xtn Alexander has
spent the better part of his time on earth participating in anticop,
antiracist, anti-imperialist, and antifascist organizing and action. He
works in emergency and trauma medicine and is an avid supporter of
music, art, and radical (sub)cultures and has been involved with Three
Way Fight since its founding in 2004.
Matthew N. Lyons is the author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right's Challenge to State and Empire and coauthor with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America.
He has been a contributor to Three Way Fight since 2005, and his
writings have also appeared in several other leftist and mainstream
publications. Matthew is co-trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary
Trust, which stewards the literary legacy of the late playwright and
activist Lorraine Hansberry.
Janeen Porter recently retired from a rewarding job in
corrections education. She spends her time fighting
the cumulative impact of numerous previous vices, desperately wanting to be on
the front line against the ongoing murders by cops, being outraged at
environmental homicides throughout the world, fighting the screwed-up health
care system, and trying to figure out where her generation went wrong and
righting it.
Michael Staudenmaier is an assistant professor of
history at Manchester University. He writes and teaches about Chicago's
Puerto Rican community, Latina/o/x social movements in the second half
of the twentieth century, and the roles of race, racism, and antiracism
in US history.
