What Do We Do Now ? Bill Fletcher

​In April 2024, the North Star Caucus adopted the Block and Build strategy as an essential part of our electoral work for this year. 
Below our ally Bill Fletcher Jr. offers ideas on What Do We Do? - descriptions of what you and I can do now to contribute to the Block and Build effort to defeat MAGA Fascism.
This is an excerpt.  A link to the full presentation follows. 

 
The following is an edited transcript of a speech delivered by Bill Fletcher, Jr. to the Southern Workers Assembly on August 8, 2024.
 
When we're looking at the far right today, and the MAGA forces, it's important for us to recognize that the Republican party has consolidated as a right-wing party for dictatorship. They have driven out most of the so-called moderates and liberals. There is no moderate wing of the Republican party. There are so-called moderates floating around there like the remnants from a storm, but they do not constitute a significant force. So they're very, very consolidated. And their objective—as they've been making very clear—is to carry out this overthrow of the 20th century. …
 
 
So what do we do? Well there's a few things. I have been involved in the formation of an organization called Standing for Democracy, recently formed, which is a worker-focused organization aimed at fighting the rising tide of fascism. We're interested in engaging organizations and individuals in that fight. This is not just an electoral fight; it's a fight that's going to have to be ideological; it's going to have to be in the courts; it's going to have to be on the ground. I'll get to that. 
 
“This is not just an electoral fight. It's a fight that's going to have to be ideological; it's going to have to be in the courts; it's going to have to be on the ground.”
 
Part of what needs to happen and what we're going to be trying to do—but I encourage all of you to do this too—is to carry out real grassroots education with your members. Most people don't really understand the nature of the far right, and sometimes think that these lunatics on the far right are so out there that they must be marginal, not recognizing that they actually have a base and that part of what happens is that the far right exists within a bubble—a bubble where their views are constantly reinforced through institutions like so-called Fox “News” and others that enforce and reinforce their particular view of the world. And you know many of our members rely on Fox News, unfortunately. So we need to conduct real education. 
 
We need to build organizations through unions and through other worker organizations at the grassroots level. That means not just relying on the internet. You know, what the far right understands is that the internet is important as long as it's done in conjunction with direct mass organizing. It does not replace individual interaction, but reinforces it. Many progressives unfortunately have come to the conclusion that struggle is done behind a keyboard and that it's okay to text and tweet and that that's the way we build mass movements.  And that's completely wrong—there is no historical foundation for that. 
 
In our local areas and in our organizations we need to be very consciously thinking about opposing the far right. And that means beginning with an assessment of the right in your area. Who is the far right in your geographic area? What do they look like? What are their organizations? Who are their leaders and spokespersons? What are their strategies? What are they attempting to do? 
 
And that leads to being prepared to disrupt the right. So think about these many examples when these far right forces—these fascists—have shown up at school committee meetings, at abortion clinics. The optics are terrible for our side because they get there, they intimidate people, and there is almost never any of us there responding. Why aren't we there standing right behind these fascists with our arms crossed, just waiting? What are we doing? I know what we're doing—we're tweeting, we're texting, we're shaking our hands, we're saying “oh, God.” But that doesn't make change. We need to be there. We need to be there when election officials are being intimidated by these fascists—threatened on a regular basis. Where are we? Where are we to say “no, we are here with election officials. We want to make sure that there's a fair election. We're going to be there with you and we're going to be there protecting the vote.” So we need to be doing that. 


“Refuse Fascism” (Aug 25, 2017) / CC BY-NC 2.0
 
We need to be defending  women and women's institutions, including but not limited to abortion clinics, when these fascists show up and are surrounding these clinics and are intimidating women. Where are we when they are trying to intimidate people? When they are trying to control their bodies. Again, where are we? We need to be there in force. And we need to be defending the LGBTQ+ population. When I said before that the far right seeks to exterminate the LGBTQ population, that was no euphemism. All of the indicators are there, everything that they are doing, or want to do, but in stages—making it more difficult if not impossible to adopt; make it more difficult if not impossible to marry; making it more difficult if not impossible to come out of your house. It goes down a certain path, and history has demonstrated this many times. 
 
We have to also be prepared to engage in self-defense and prepare ourselves at multiple levels, including guarding against provocations. One of the things that I recently was looking at was how, in a number of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, there have been right-wing provocateurs who have gone in, in order to incite the protesters to engage in various kinds of activities, including anti-semitic rhetoric and various kinds of actions. We need to train our members and our leaders on how to identify potential provocateurs and what to do when these people show up. 
 
And finally we need to learn from the New Popular Front in France, which I thought was a marvelous example, in which they not only came together to stand against the rise of these new fascists but they also articulated a vision—a progressive vision for what they want to see France become. And I would say to us we have nothing to gain from the status quo. That doesn't mean we don't protect our institutions! But the status quo is not enough. We need to be the ones that are advocating for the expansion of democracy, rather than contraction. We need to be the ones that are expanding on workers rights, on environmental rights, on changing the way that the economy functions. We need to be speaking that now. 
 
That may or may not end up being the voice of the Democratic Party. But this goes to a point about that, which is, as my friend Carl Davidson has pointed out, the Democratic Party is not really a political party. It's an alliance. There are several parties within that alliance. Progressives need to become conscious that we are part of that, and that as part of that—as part of a “party” within that—we need to be articulating our own vision for what needs to happen. We need to be pushing tactical allies that we are engaged with in the fight against the fascist threat. The tactical allies don't have to be our friends, and in many cases are going to be people that we're going to be in struggle with—and are in struggle with, and have been in struggle with—but what we can agree on is that we must defeat MAGA and we must defeat them now. And crush them politically. I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.


Join Bill Fletcher, Jr. and others on Sunday, August 25, 5:00-6:00 p.m. EST for our upcoming webinar “3 Socialist Tasks for 2024: Block, Broaden Build.”