On September 22, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump filed an executive order intended to designate Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Like so many of Trump’s other executive orders, this one is likely to be ineffective because there is no identified organization, leadership or membership to apply it to. In fact, if you look at the text of Trump’s anti-Antifa executive order there is no specific person or recognized organization mentioned in the text.
As our dear Leader and beloved President and his many acolytes toss adjectives around that they don’t understand, it may be time to distinguish between various of these terms, just so that our right wing friends can get a few modest guideposts to what these things actually mean.
To establish some modest bona fides, I should mention that I did actually study Marxian economics in 1976-80 at the University of Massachusetts, back when UMass was one of the three universities in the country where one could actually study Marxian anything. At the time UMass had inherited distinguished faculty from Harvard University, where they had not received tenure. It ended up being our blessing.
Also, I should also point out that there is no “radical” left wing in the United States. That pretty much went out of fashion with the death of Eugene Debs in 1926 and the subsequent demise of the Communist Party during the Second World War.
About as radical as it gets in the United States these days is Bernie Sanders — still hugely popular among the masses — is a “Democratic Socialist” who believes in European style social democracies, such as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and mostly the other Nordic states. And maybe New Zealand. Those are hardly “radical” states by any historic definition.
So what do these terms actually mean?
Communism is a political and economic ideology advocating for a classless society in which the means of production (factories, land, resources) are collectively owned, and wealth is distributed based on need. Although the idea existed before him, it was most fully articulated by Karl Marx, who based his economic theories on the Labor Theory of Value, or the idea that what makes things valuable is the labor that someone was willing to put into it. (Capitalist systems are generally based on the Utilitarian or Subjective Theory of Value, where things have value based only on what people are willing to pay for it.)
Socialism is a softer version of communism, and in Marx’s system, a “transitional” phase between capitalism and communism. It is an economic and political system where the means of production are owned or regulated by the community (often through the state) to ensure more equality in wealth and opportunity. Private property and markets are permitted, but the system emphasizes redistribution and public control of essential industries. The former Yugoslavia might be the best example of a functioning socialist state, a planned economy with a vibrant free market.
Marxism is mostly the economic and political theory developed by Karl Marx. Communism and socialism existed before Marx, but (like Freud in psychology), Marx really articulated the modern formulation. His seminal work is Das Kapital, which is really about the exploitation of labor and working class conditions in London. He analyzes history as a struggle between classes, especially the bourgeoisie (owners of capital) and the proletariat (working class). It is more of an economic and philosophical framework, and not a blueprint for how modern states should actually function.
Leninism, on the other hand, is a political ideology trying to apply Marxist ideas in turn-of-the-century Russia. (Marx really expected his ideas to take hold in modern capitalist societies, and not a predominantly agrarian and semi-feudal economy with limited industrial development.) Established by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leninism advocates for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries to lead the working class in overthrowing capitalism. The state must act as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” after revolution to suppress counter-revolution and build socialism. (Of course, in actuality a dictatorship of the proletariat really just ends up being a dictatorship, plain and simple, which is one of the hard-won lessons of the 20th Century.)
Fascism is less of a political philosophy than a designation for a type of authoritarian state. It is generally a far-right, authoritarian ultranationalist state that rejects democracy, equality, and individual rights in favor of a strong centralized state, led by a dictator. The prototypes for fascism are Mussolini (who invented the term), Hitler, and Franco. The advantages of fascism are primarily a certain kind of efficiency, such as in Italy under Mussolini when “the trains ran on time.” Fascism is often good for businesses and corporations, where there are few limits or regulations on what businesses can do, and bad for everyone else. Also, fascism almost always leads to war, at least to civil war. It can be distinguished from Monarchism primarily in that monarchs are hereditary, and that monarchs can occasionally be “enlightened” and actually make daily life better for their own people.
Anti-fascism is simply the opposition to fascism. It is not an administrative “system” for how to run a state and is not correlated with socialism or communism (although sometimes people believe in both). During the lead-up to World War II there were many individuals who were passionately anti-fascist, but it has never been a structured movement, especially in the United States. Antifa, in the United States, has no leadership, no fundraising, and no designated membership. They have generally not engaged in political violence (mostly some property damage during the George Floyd protests), but are more likely to have individual activists show up to counter-protest events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville during Trump’s first term.
And that’s about it, my friends. These are the terms that Trump and his acolytes so consistently misuse, and throw around as red herrings to try to make us all mad. Name-calling, pure and simple, is Trump’s stock in trade. And for many, many Americans, who don’t really understand what these terms mean, that will be enough.
