Amid Rising Fascism, the Left Looks for Action. It Should Also Ask Questions.

The anti-colonial struggle for a free Palestine has reached a desperate point as the Israeli military regularly fires on starving Palestinians seeking aid and water. Meanwhile, the rise of fascism in the United States continues at an alarming pace, with unprecedented funding passed for Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansion as the public continues to witness masked kidnappings and disappearances.

Seventy-five years after the publication of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Robin D.G. Kelley argues that the book still has important lessons to teach in the current historical moment. Fascist states are not a perversion of liberal democracies but rather their extension, and it is critically important that anti-fascism incorporates anti-colonial approaches.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Kelley offers a vision of the work needed on the left that goes beyond looking for answers or examples to follow. Kelley is a professor of U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Freedom Dreams and Hammer and Hoe. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

October Krausch: You started your remarks at the Socialism Conference by saying you’re a better historian than activist. Why was it important to you to name that right at the top?

Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s part of a larger point I was making about what it means to be at this conference where people are literally looking for answers. I think we have done an absolutely horrible job of understanding and analyzing both the conditions now and before. A lot of people want inspiration from me. They want me to get people inspired about the possible future and what we’re going to do. Because I write about social movements, they want me to pull out examples, and that’s not useful to me. I specifically gave a lecture that was about understanding the things that are not so clear to us: the close relationship between liberalism and fascism historically and in the present, and the fundamentally intertwined relationship between colonialism and fascism. That’s what I do well. If someone says, “Well I need you to go out and get 40,000 signatures,” I can’t do that.

Some people have decided that scholarship and analysis are less important than action. I’m not saying it’s more important or less; I’m saying you can’t separate it. By holding up action separate from critical analysis, we end up fetishizing this invention called the activist. And then they say, “Yeah, we love Robin because he’s an activist.”

So that was my way of saying I don’t want to be in a position where people say, “So what do we do?” Because that’s for all of us as a collective to figure out. And I wanted people to listen and follow this analysis, which I think is useful, but not so much for literal lessons. I don’t think history works that way. The lessons to me are the lessons that Césaire laid out [in Discourse on Colonialism] in terms of the relationship.

What you’re saying reminds me of something I’ve learned from abolition: One of the problems with the criminal legal system is its cookie-cutter approach. We have essentially the exact same prison in Michigan and in Texas and in California, then the U.S. exports those prisons to Brazil and that’s the “solution” for all kinds of harm. I’ve learned a lot by taking seriously that history doesn’t work that way, the social world doesn’t work that way, conflicts don’t work that way. But you see that desire for a template to follow repeated all over. Very few things work that way and it creates a lot of harm.

Exactly. It’s also that the powers that be want you to use a cookie-cutter approach. I feel like part of my whole project as a Marxist historian is to try to locate and understand what we can’t see. That’s what Karl Marx did. In Capital, Volume 1, Marx talks about the secret of the labor theory of value. All that value, you can’t see it; it’s hidden because it’s in labor power.

There can never be a cookie-cutter approach because we’ve got to figure out what we don’t see. I fear sometimes it’s very easy to fall into the trap of empiricism. People would think, Well, of course because if something is empirical it means that we can actually locate it and see it. The problem is it’s hiding other things that we can’t see.

I’ve never been one to only write about the glories and the existence of working people because we have to understand what is it that reproduces work. Why is it that they’re fighting in the first place? Why is it that they’re losing? That means studying power. That means like reading all 925 pages or whatever it is of Project 2025. To me, that’s just as important as reading personal narratives of working people winning.

At the keynote, you talked a lot about the continuity of fascism and liberal democracy, especially the continuity of fascism and colonialism. You offered that the establishment of Israel precisely in the era of formal international decolonization is a really powerful example of why we have fascism here in the United States today: Colonialism never ended and we will always have the problem of fascism if we’re not thinking about those as intertwined things. Some of your examples were about anti-fascist struggles that were not anti-colonial or were anti-Black. Your lecture had me thinking about Sophie Lewis’s recent book, Enemy Feminisms. One of the things Lewis says is that, as feminists, we have a tendency to define, say, anti-abortion feminists or KKK feminists, as outside of “real” feminism. Lewis says that we have to own that and then we have to think about where the seeds of domination and white supremacy lie inside of feminism. Do you think it makes sense to think in a similar way about enemy lefts or enemy socialisms?

The left has already done that. We call it sectarianism! Unfortunately, it’s not always been done in the most thoughtful way. I think what Sophie Lewis is trying to do in the book is very thoughtful in terms of having a critical analysis of the positions that are within a framework of feminism. It’s not to abandon feminism, but to really understand it. With the enemy socialism example, these folks are basically constructing enemies as a way of either trying to maintain or attain some kind of hegemony within left circles, or because they have a disagreement in analysis that’s not a fundamental disagreement in values.

Part of my concern is actually the opposite. I understand enemy feminists, but once we start to do what the left has done for a long time — that is, attack those we disagree with as social fascists or as left opportunists — there’s no opportunity to build through critique, dialogue, and struggle, which offers a way of understanding that maybe our critique is wrong.

For me, that’s also about grace. There are some people in left organizations who I completely disagree with, including (and I struggle with this) the leftists who have a really bad position on race. I could make a decision to sort of expose and dispose of them, or to say, “Okay, let’s critique that failure to understand race.”

I’m so frustrated with the Marxist-Leninists who are basically applauding Donald Trump because the Trump administration is getting rid of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], like, “Well, that’s great, because DEI is just a neoliberal trick.” For me, that’s just dumb. So rather than say, “Oh, they’re the enemy,” I write and argue and publicly speak against that position and explain why. I expect and want a response. Because to debate it and recognize that we share a lot in common is to pull people within that movement into ours.

I’m wrestling with some of these ideas and I think a lot of people are. When is someone your enemy? And when is it like, “Okay, we can travel together for a certain amount of time”? That’s a difficult decision to make and there’s no template for it. At the same time, we have to really draw some hard lines because people are going to sell us out when we’re in these higher stakes.

I agree with that. I think there are times when we do have to draw hard lines. I guess what I’m also saying is that there’s a value in making that critique as clear and public as possible. It doesn’t have to be friendly.

There are basically a lot of racist white left organizations. They’re everywhere. I dream about them at night. There are left tendencies that are deeply nationalist, which I think is problematic as well.

If we’re trying to build a working-class power, then it doesn’t make sense to ignore or vilify every single segment of the working class. It’s enough to continue taking them to task and explaining why. In Hammer and Hoe, I wrote about Klansmen who end up joining the Communist Party because they saw it as maybe the best option, but they don’t come politically correct. They would use like, comrade n*****. Communist Party members were like, “You can’t say that,” but they wouldn’t say, “You have to leave.” The Party would work with them as much as they could to bring them in, but at the same time, promote organic leadership. That’s two really important things that may seem counterbalancing: to promote organic leadership and to promote and support people who may not actually know it all.

It’s also important to listen and engage because if we really do believe we have the right position on everything, then we’re living in a dreamworld. I’ve never known of a movement in my life that has the right position on everything. Even today, we’re so advanced that we don’t have the right position on everything. You don’t know yet.

It’s funny, it feels like a contradiction in and of itself to say, “Oh, I didn’t know either and now I know this thing,” but you feel at any given moment in time like, “I have a bunch of strongly held beliefs. They’re the correct beliefs.”

Right, there’s nothing wrong with really believing that you have the correct belief. In fact, if you don’t, why do you do it? The contradictions are high.

Part of what I was trying to say [in the keynote speech] was that too many of us, at least in my circle, stop at the recognition that fascism itself is a product of colonial rule. And then they end up falling into the shaft of creating the hierarchy of the colonized and the white people. Part of my discussion about austerity was to add another dimension to class struggle, saying that in order for colonialism to actually work, they had to crush the European working class. They had to make the working class not just nationalist, but weak enough to eliminate as much anti-imperialist sentiment as possible.

That means we have to go even deeper in our analysis of understanding the European working class. It’s just not enough to analyze the world as if all the colonized are the oppressed and the white people are the oppressor. Because then we have no understanding of the BRICS countries, for example. That’s what I’m saying: A lot of us, even those who think we have all the answers, don’t have that analysis yet.

I was reminded in a recent panel at the Socialism Conference that the Vietnamese national liberation movement did win against more powerful militaries. That’s easy to forget at a time when people here don’t seem to feel that there is potential for big wins. But it happens and it’s happened in history. Simultaneously, you highlight the way those victories are incomplete. And that’s part of why we’re still fighting fascism, right? How do you negotiate living in that tension?

Yes. Vietnam as a national liberation movement defeated the United States. Vietnam as a national liberation defeated France in 1954. Vietnam, just like Haiti. But I would argue that communism in Vietnam was defeated, even though the nation of Vietnam won in the short term.

What is Vietnam now? Vietnam, along with Bangladesh, produces much of the world’s textiles from the lowest-paid workers. It’s the continuation of the exploitation of labor in a place that fought to end the exploitation of labor. Most of those companies that do business making apparel in Vietnam are U.S. companies or multinational companies. Vietnam just made this trade deal with Trump. There is a rising Vietnamese elite, much like China. The Chinese Communist Party has become — and again, I have lots of debates with people about this — has become the organization, if you’re a bureaucrat, where you can become a millionaire. That’s not the vision that brought peasants and workers to the party. The victory is nevertheless a sign of the inability of U.S. imperialism to win everything it wants. But it’s also the long-term defeat of communist vision and practice, and it’s a sign that the capital order is intact and it ebbs and flows.

Capitalism is not going anywhere anytime soon unless we do something different. If we were to really take the question of why did Vietnam defeat the United States, we have to ask two other questions: What was the state of the United States at the time of its withdrawal? It was a global economic crisis and the U.S. economy was in shambles in many ways. The price of the war was just too much. What made the price of war go up? Working people in the United States. All those struggles in the ’60s and early ’70s to expand the welfare state made government spending higher. The War on Poverty was a minuscule amount of money but, nevertheless, it was competing with the war expenditure.

The result of the global realignment that has happened since that time is that the combined power of China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia outweighs the United States. What did these BRICS countries produce? Did they produce the beautiful, amazing welfare state of the non-aligned movements? No, they created massive inequality and state repression, all the things that are required to maintain colonial and fascist power. So we’re still here. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but this is the nature of class struggle. The grounds keep shifting on us. And if you don’t see the grounds as global, then we end up not knowing who or how to fight or how things happen behind our backs.

This is why we don’t need slogans. We need answers. And we can’t have answers without really good questions. We can’t have good questions without knowing the history. And it comes down to that. I think about what it means that someone like Vladimir Lenin, who was kind of busy, would write an entire book-length study on agriculture in the U.S.

Marxists have always been immersed in history, but we’re not so much anymore. It’s not about the left, it’s about our culture altogether. And again, it also goes back to the activist ethos, and this notion that to be activists, we need action now. That’s kind of a fetish. When political education ends up becoming, “What are the immediate strategic issues that we need to deal with now?” rather than developing a larger analysis, that’s a little bit of anti-intellectualism.