My favorite 🧡

The photo version 🤭

These steps might need to evolve more for this current moment. Regardless, this book really struck a cord for me. If you're still here--thanks for reading.

--Finally, we must provide material and moral support (mutual aid) for the persecuted groups, which can include a moral, political, and material boycott of the fascist government.

--Since the forces of fascism are organized internationally. It is also important that the fight against fascism be organized internationally. We are currently seeing a rise in fascism around the world.

--Labor parties/orgs of every tendency must form a special body for leading the struggle against fascism. This body should compile facts of the fascist movement, educate the working class of its hostile nature through mixed-media, organize through self-defense, & special antifascist youth education.

--First we can recognize that fascism contradicts itself. We've seen Trump say he will help the working class, but he is actively taking steps to undermine the economy the lower class depends on. This will hopefully lead to U.S. fascism's undoing, but likely not before we see much more violence.

Zetkin maintains that the character of fascism will be different country to country. But there are some key steps we can take to fight fascism:

In 20th century Italy, anti-nationals were disciplined through violence–facilities burnt to the ground and people murdered.

--With the power Trump has accumulated, he is deploying brutal and violent terror by way of the El Salvadoran prison, mass layoffs, stripping away the protections our government has provided that has made us free–safe food, clean air, bespoke approaches to health for rare diseases.

This almost requires no explanation of how Trump has deployed these tactics–his rude oversimplifications and pithy, hateful one liners do the work itself. By leveraging the moods and interests of the social masses, Trump was able to rise to power.

-- In Italy in 1921, Zetkin recounts that “[f]ascism won the masses through sham revolutionary demands advocated through unscrupulously demagogic agitation. Its pompous verbal radicalism was aimed above all against the government of Giolitti, ‘betrayer of the nation.’”

--The Trump administration is deploying key methods of fascism to cement the power of the ruling class. Exploitation of the working class, dissolving the federal workforce, and subjugating Trans humans, migrants, women, and people of color, are means to a broader goal: to weaken the lower classes.

--Now you've got a billionaire squad leading the country who are, as Zetkin wrote, “striving for the reconstruction of the capitalist economy…the maintenance of [the bourgeoise’s] class domination.”