Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism

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.

Praise

“Three Way Fight not only represents the most pressing and insightful analysis on the far right available, but it is also written from within the movements to fight back. Offering some of the most explosive documents from the recent antifascist movement, these authors chart a new course for understanding the far right. A great read for both newcomers and longtime antifascists, Three Way Fight is simultaneously a documentary history of twenty-first-century antifascism and a theoretical evolution in the way we understand the future of the far right.”
—Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse

“The essays and interviews in this volume offer a bracing clarity about the dangers we face, complex understandings of how we got here, and deeply critical perspectives on how to move forward toward liberatory futures. Three Way Fight's hard-earned wisdom, grounded in real political struggle over many decades, consistently provides better analyses of the far right than any current academic debates about fascism.”
—Joe Lowndes, coauthor of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity

“Three Way Fight introduces an invaluable genealogy of antifascist thought and practice that has long been attentive to the ways that capitalism and liberal governance have nourished right-wing authoritarianism. In a moment of growing political despair, the contributors remind us of the rich lessons and insights developed across decades of struggle against the far right that must be centered in our collective work for human dignity and liberation.”
—Daniel Martinez HoSang, co-author of Producer, Patriots, and Parasites: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity

About the Contributors

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.

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