Three-Way Fight: An Interview w/ Matthew N. Lyons and Xtn on Antifascism in 2025

While time has only seemed to accelerate over the past quarter century, the past six months have cracked off at lightning speed. The shifts in global politics that have been building for years have escalated the realignment both in the U.S. and internationally, as Trump takes sweeping control of national politics with the support of a Republican Party that is further to the right than we have seen in decades. Trump and the GOP are riding part of the same global wave that has brought a rash of success to far-right, national populist parties across Europe, the growth of Hindutva in India, Likud’s nationalist coalition in Israel, and the rise of insurgent leaders like Javier Milei in Argentina. At the same time, there are attacks on Western imperialism coming from countries with their own far-right politics, from Russia to Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

While this political reality has created fractures and conflict within the larger radical left as to the role of social movements and where to build alliances, none of these debates are new. Arguments over how to understand the far right, its relationship to the ruling class, and who our allies are in the fight against Western imperialism have a deep history, and it’s one of the places where antifascism has made its most important impacts.

Part of the intervention antifascists have made is with the three way fight analysis, which was developed by militant antifascists to explain why so many on the fascist right position themselves as enemies of capitalism and the state, and to explain why the ruling class, both globally and domestically, seems to lack unified interests. In a revolutionary struggle, there is more than just working people (the left) and state and capital — there are often multiple parties, including a far right that may be made up of people from both the ruling and working classes and whose interests could be different from both.

This concept was developed alongside the creation of a website, Three Way Fight, launched twenty years ago to publish some of the most important writing and analysis on the far right and to track the history of antifascist resistance. Two of its editors and contributors, Matthew L. Lyons and Xtn Alexander, put together an anthology of some of the important pieces expressing this concept, from the website and elsewhere, that was published by PM Press and Kersplebedeb in 2024: Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism.

We spoke with both of them about what the three way fight concept offers to social movements, and what antifascist theory and praxis offer activists today who are trying to build an effective resistance to a far right that holds unprecedented state power.

Xtn: So first off, I want to say that three way fight is shorthand for several concerns. And while we describe it as three, there are clearly many subcategories within those three. The big one, of course, is implied in the name: it’s a fight against fascism and against the state. But at the time, there were a lot of other issues that we felt were part of the fight we were in.

The concept initially emerged during the period of organizing in the late 1990s to early 2000s, when some of the people who began formulating or using that phrase were mostly grouped around Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and connected to various struggles that ARA was involved in. The three way fight idea was about situating a radical, militant, and even revolutionary approach to anti-fascism — not just a fight against the fascists, but also against the state, its proxies, and its supporters.

It was really about identifying our side — meaning the militant anti-fascist movement, and within that, a more specifically revolutionary tendency or current. We were trying to position ourselves both against the fascists and against the state. It was us trying to define our own space within that broader struggle.

It was us trying to define beyond just anti-fascism and self-defense — meaning not just taking a self-defense posture, or a narrow version of anti-fascism, or even an anti-fascism that was ambivalent on questions of the state — there were those, in our view even worse, who would consider collaboration or coordination with aspects of the state. The three way fight was explicitly an anti-state, anti-system approach to anti-fascism, as well as to the broader struggles we were involved in.

I want to add a couple more things. A substantial aspect — maybe even an initially central one — was dealing with the tensions that arise in organizing and struggles that took a militant, non-legalistic approach; what some would call a physical-force approach. We were trying to think about how these movements could develop popular, directly democratic approaches to organizing, while also addressing the challenges that come up within militant struggles — particularly how to employ direct action and physical force without subordinating our overall politics to a kind of quasi-militarism.

At the time, we were concerned that this could run the risk of falling into political gangsterism or even left authoritarianism. So part of what we were trying to do was explore those tensions within the organizing we were involved in, while positioning ourselves specifically as a revolutionary current within anti-fascist and anti-racist struggles. And then, eventually, the Three Way Fight blog came about. It was initially called “an insurgent blog on the struggle against the state and fascism”, and that was back in 2004. It was really one of the first online anti-fascist platforms — at least in the U.S. — where there could be both serious analysis and reporting on what was happening on the ground. Since then, of course, a whole range of other projects and platforms have emerged.

Matthew: To expand on that a bit, Three Way Fight has always been a project that tries to foster a political approach that’s both radical and nuanced or multi-sided. So for example the project has always brought together anarchists and independent Marxists in dialog with each other, because we think that’s crucial for antifascism and for the left. And we’ve tried to take the fascists and the far right seriously as a movement that in its twisted way speaks to real human hopes and fears, that has smart people as well as opportunists and fools, that has factional divisions and conflicts, and that’s always trying to grow and change and learn from its own mistakes. This isn’t an intellectual exercise for us – it’s about trying to understand our enemies so we can fight them more effectively.

Shane Burley: We are talking at a moment where Israel and the U.S. are engaging Iran in the early stages of a war and large anti-imperialist actions are being organized by groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the ANSWER Coalition, which often come under fire from other sectors of the left for authoritarian politics and sympathies with far-right regimes who are fighting U.S. imperialism. This is part of the tendency that the three way fight analysis and antifascism has always intervened on, particularly the campism of that politic. But we also have a moment of legitimate imperialist violence. How do we relate to these struggles?

Matthew: It’s a good example of how this is really a double-edged issue, which is true of how we approach a lot of things. For example, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Workers World, and that broader neo-Stalinist tendency have been central to a lot of the red-brown politics we’ve seen take shape in various forms. Not usually through open alliances, but by giving platforms to far-rightists of various kinds, or serving as apologists for reactionary opposition to the U.S. and the West under the guise of a kind of pseudo-progressive, anti-imperialist stance.

All of that is real and important to acknowledge — and it goes along with other odious things that PSL, its supporters, and similar groups do within the broader left and mass movements, such as teaming up with liberals to isolate and silence other leftists, such as covering up sexual abuse in movement organizations. That’s a conversation we could easily spend a lot of time unpacking.

But at the same time, there’s also a real need to be mindful of how PSL is being scapegoated and targeted in ways that fuel not only a kind of centrist anti-leftism, but also a Trumpist anti-leftism. For example, PSL has been used as one of the scapegoats in the crackdown against anti-ICE militancy in Los Angeles and other places — and that’s just the most recent and extreme example of a broader pattern we’ve tried to draw attention to. It’s something I wrote about last year in a piece on the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which is this very smarmy, police-infested, “anti-extremism” think tank.

The NCRI wrote about this pipeline of funding from Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai businessman tied to the Chinese Communist propaganda apparatus, funneling money to various PSL-affiliated groups as well as Code Pink, Vijay Prashad’s think tank Tricontinental, and others. These funding ties were first documented by antifascists and then by the New York Times, and I believe they’re real. But NCRI presented it as though the Chinese Communist Party is directly orchestrating the Palestine solidarity movement, which is complete nonsense. The NCRI has a history of promoting bullshit conspiracy theories about leftist “outside agitators” supposedly orchestrating the George Floyd rebellion, and their take on Singham was more of the same.

It’s like claiming that because the Open Society Foundations — the George Soros network — provides funding to a number of leftist and progressive groups, that there’s a grand conspiracy run by a Hungarian Jew pulling the strings. Sure, some of those money ties are real, but social movements aren’t run by conspiracies.

So when we’re warning against red-brown politics, we also have to warn about the ways the scapegoating of those politics gets used to justify and legitimize state repression. And like I’ve said, that’s a big part of how we try to approach these kinds of issues — holding both of those dynamics in view at the same time.

Xtn: There’s a real attractiveness to PSL on a lot of levels. They are a mass organization. They have femme, queer, trans people of color in leadership positions. And for the last couple of decades — but especially recently — they’ve been one of the most consistent groups able to put people in the streets in any kind of semi-mass to mass way. They have links to unions, and in fact, some of their cadres hold high positions in various unions.

If you’re a young activist, outraged by the system, its wars, and its injustices, a group like PSL is going to seem very attractive, especially given the absence of a range of organizations and movements from previous generations that no longer exist today. PSL is one of the biggest groups out there, and it serves as an entry point for many.

I think we could have a whole conversation about the dynamics within these larger organizations — do they truly welcome initiative from their cadre? Are they teaching their members to think and act independently? That’s a whole discussion on its own. I’ve seen a lot of critiques of PSL online lately — some of them may be legitimate, some not. But I think it’s very dangerous to see so many of these critiques emerging at the same moment when the state is also targeting groups like PSL.

What I’d like to emphasize is that we need to figure out how to enter into principled, responsible, but political alliances, whoever the other groups might be. We should avoid being needlessly sectarian — though that’s difficult. On what basis do we build a united front with another group? And at what point do we make clear the distance we need to take when serious political differences or harmful actions arise? These are dangerous times, and those are tough, unavoidable questions.

The reality is, we don’t currently have a wide range of organizations offering clear, viable alternatives to groups like PSL. So I want to be careful not to be sectarian myself. But we are in a very precarious moment — the state is coming down hard, or at least preparing to, on groups like PSL, and at the same time, we’re seeing waves of bottom-up, social media-driven attacks on PSL. 

The last thing I’ll say about groups like PSL, or the Marcyite tradition they come out of, is that while they have their roots in a kind of Trotskyist analysis of degenerated workers’ states, over the last couple of decades they’ve applied that framework primarily to the anti-imperialist struggle.

As a result, they will often support a range of regimes — whether it’s Syria (under Assad), Iran, Russia, or others — that violently and murderously suppress national uprisings, protests, and democratic revolutions. And while they might say, we don’t support those crackdowns, they nonetheless argue that in the struggle against the U.S. and NATO, the primary enemy is always imperialism, and the rest must be overlooked or deprioritized. That’s a deeply flawed position because it opens the door to collaboration, whether tacit or explicit, with a whole range of other forces — including fascists, the far right, and neo-Nazis, who likewise oppose NATO and the U.S., and also oppose democratic uprisings and grassroots protests from below.

Shane Burley: In talking with organizers lately, I’ve heard some make the case that we’re moving from a three way fight into a two-way fight — meaning that fascists have, at least in part, taken some degree of state power. This framing feels too simplistic and too definitive, the state isn’t just one thing, and the ruling class does not have unified interests (or control). But it does get at least a sense that some have that the far-right has an unprecedented ability to manifest it’s politics not just in extrajudicial ways, but through state forces. And the attack on democratic norms, institutions, colleges, unions, and areas where we see struggle happen all is reminiscent of moments when fascists movements take power.

We’ve also seen a decline in the number of insurgent far-right groups (with the exception of explicit neo-Nazis) and a rise in openly far-right ideas within the GOP, driven by the dominance of both the MAGA coalition and the National Conservatives. “Anti-government” groups, which are really groups just against liberal governance, have skyrocketed, but they are also allied very openly with state power. So the small drop in percentage of fascist groups is not exactly comforting since it is largely because those fascist politics have moved into the ruling political party. This has been bolstered by the growing influence of places like the Claremont Institute, Turning Point USA, and Chronicles Magazine. What this means is that many of these ideologues now have access not only to insurgent networks but to law enforcement and federal agencies.

How does this changing dynamic shape the way you think about antifascism in 2025?

Matthew: Three Way Fight has been exploring Trump and the MAGA movement’s relationship with fascism for ten years. I’ve written about it a number of times, such as in my October 2024 piece “Notes on Trump/MAGA 2024.” There's value in trying to sort out the concept of what fascism is, but it can also be kind of a distraction. It’s much more important to look at how we get a clear analysis of what’s going on, regardless of the labels we put on it, and how we develop good strategies — again, regardless of the labels. Whether you call it fascist or something else, it’s clear that the Trump regime is making  a serious effort to turn the United States into a dictatorship. Even if it doesn’t fully succeed, this authoritarian drive has devastating implications for oppressed communities and for radical political movements.

As far as the idea of a three way fight versus a two-way fight, to me, part of what three way fight is about is simply recognizing that far-right forces — whether fascist or otherwise — don’t just serve as tools of the ruling class. They aren’t merely capitalist puppets or mouthpieces. They have a more complex and often contradictory relationship with capitalist interests.

I don’t think anyone could seriously look at Trump’s economic policies over the past several months and deny that. Sure, he’s a billionaire — but if you polled Wall Street on his tariff policies, how many capitalists would actually support them? Not many.

At the same time, the left also has to contend with the Democratic Party and the millions upon millions of people who continue to place their faith in it, or in liberalism under some other guise. How can we reduce all of this to a two-way fight? It’s at least three, and really, it’s multi-sided. The regime itself encompasses multiple factions with competing interests, as our comrade Dandy Andy has argued on Three Way Fight, and while Trump has been pretty effective at keeping these different forces in line so far, it’s a point of vulnerability for him and for the regime.

As far as what’s different from before, I certainly don’t feel like I have a clear sense of exactly what we should be doing right now, except in very broad terms. What I’ve been saying for decades is that there needs to be a combination of focused, radical initiatives that challenge entrenched systems of power, alongside broad, diverse coalitions to combat far-right and fascist forces.

Both of those things are still true. The specifics of how that gets implemented have never been entirely clear in practical terms, in general — and while the conditions are certainly different now, the same principles still apply.

Xtn: First off, I want to quote another one of our enemies, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who talked about the concept of unknown unknowns. I think the Trump administration and what’s happening now, both domestically and globally, contain a lot of unknowns. We don’t know where things are going to go. Trump 2.0 is a new development, and I think a lot of the categories we were using previously — fascism this, fascism that — are still useful in some ways, but in other ways, they might not provide the analysis we actually need. We often want to fit everything into a category, and while that’s useful up to a point, it’s also limiting.

When we look at Trump, Trumpism, and the broader Trumpist coalition in this country — and more globally — it may not be entirely satisfying, but I think it’s better if we start from how these regimes and these forms of government understand themselves. They identify as traditionalist, populist, nationalist, and while there’s a range, there are also clear commonalities. But it’s different from classical fascisms that emerged in the period between World War I and the last couple of decades.

One thing I’ve been trying to think through is: how do we define this moment? How do we look at something like Trumpism, and more broadly, the international wave it’s part of? I’ve been using this somewhat in-vogue concept — though I recognize there are problems with doing so — of the rise of illiberal politics as a way to understand far-right politics emerging within the parameters of bourgeois democracy. These forces are attempting to capture state power, remake its structures, and reshape society in its totality through the state, establishing a new far-right social order.

What I’ve also been considering — and this gets to the unknown unknowns — is that, in conversations with Matthew and other people connected to the Three Way Fight project, there’s no consensus on this, so this is just my perspective. There are serious questions about whether we’re leaving behind the neoliberal order that has existed for the past 40 years, or even since the post-World War II period, with the U.S. as the primary dominant power in the emerging capitalist order. I’ve been tuned in on this idea that maybe, in fact, we are in a transition period — from the dominant form of global capitalist organization to a new system of management. It’s still capitalist, but it isn’t the same as what we’ve had for the last several decades.

This period of transition has brought new politics and new visions. Some are clearly influenced by classical fascism, but on the whole, they’re expressing themselves as a new kind of authoritarianism. Some of these authoritarianisms still attempt to cloak themselves in liberal-democratic values. I would include the Democratic Party in this category. They’re a repressive political force, not a friend to humanity, nor to the working class, the poor, or the millions kidnapped and deported under Democratic administrations.

So what we’re seeing is a new set of authoritarianisms emerging in a new moment. I think we need to seriously consider this rather than simply trying to fit everything into old categories. I’d also say that if this is a transition from the past to something new, we should expect significant conflicts between different ruling-class visions, and a period of experimentation. We don’t know what’s going to happen with Trumpism or with the broader authoritarian wave.

But within that uncertainty lies opportunity, and that’s why I believe the three way fight framework remains relevant. Nothing is static. There’s a dynamic at play, and maintaining a complex, nuanced view of what’s happening is still essential — not just giving in to the oversimplification that the fascists have taken over and now it’s a two-way fight. We don’t know what will happen from one day to the next, let alone a year from now. New politics will emerge. There may be fissures. We have to think about how to build ourselves as an independent, countervailing force at a mass level.

I reject the simplification that the fascists have taken over and now it’s a two-way fight, because even within that, there are too many different sides and competing visions for how society should be.

Matthew: I think it’s clear to most people that neoliberalism has been in crisis for some years now. The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession serve as a kind of standard marker for that. Someone recently commented in a Three Way Fight internal conversation that, in some ways, Trump’s political incoherence — whether it’s the volatility of his tariff policies or just the general way he governs — actually reflects the fact that the capitalist class itself is still trying to figure out how to move beyond neoliberalism.

But there’s no clear, unified strategy to replace it. And I don’t mean that in a vulgar sense, like there’s some committee behind closed doors telling Trump what to do. It’s more that there isn’t a committee — no centralized direction saying, “This is what we need to do next.” That absence of coordination results in a lot of flailing about and a lack of coherent capitalist direction, which in turn enables personalities — and Trump is certainly a personality — to play an outsized role.

Xtn: Part of that conversation was a reference to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. It’s the idea of moving from one period to the next — and how there’s uncertainty about what’s going to emerge in that next period. In the meantime, morbid symptoms appear, which could be translated as monsters appear. Trump is a monster. Trumpism is a monster. And that presents very real dangers for the working class and the poor as a whole.

So the question is: how do we organize? What examples of organization and resistance are emerging right now? This is the moment when radicals, unionists, and anti-fascists need to be thinking seriously about what’s on the horizon, what’s happening now, and what’s going to be happening in the future. It’s also a time to rethink our own histories, strategies, and tactics — to take those past experiences and lessons and apply them in new ways, because we’re in unprecedented times.

I believe there are a lot of lessons to be drawn, but in this kind of confusion, in this time of monsters, the real question is how we’re going to respond. And honestly, that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot — and I don’t always have a clear answer.

SB:I can be a little rigid, but I think it’s important to separate antifascism from other analytical frameworks, forms of organizing, or social movements. It is not simply interchangeable with other movements on the left that share some of the same guiding values or ideas. Yet, the way antifascism has developed—at least in the American context, though likely elsewhere as well—is built largely around extrajudicial, insurgent, paramilitary, and mostly non-state forces (which may partner with the state without being synonymous with it).

However, those politics are now present in the GOP and, presumably, the state itself, manifested not just through neo-Nazi gangs or far-right Patriot militias, but also through police departments, the FBI, Border Patrol, and ICE. So, how do we need to rethink the strategy and tactics of antifascism, given that far-right politics now occupy a different role in structures of power, and the threat can take the form of state violence in ways that outpace the conditions under which some of our tactics were first conceived?

Xtn: I think there are different ways to conceptualize antifascism. I’ve always seen the need for specific antifascist campaigns. I usually view them as mostly a defensive posture, and I think that’s important. But I also think that, at times, we’ve moved beyond that, and the current conditions demand something more than a narrow antifascist strategy can address.

I think the antifascist movement, especially as I’m concerned, and I think what the three way fight represents, is a liberatory and antifascist strategy—a revolutionary and antifascist strategy—that has to be part of a broader movement. And I think that’s what’s being demanded now.

This isn’t to say that we won’t still need specific antifascist strategies to protect against insurgent far-right violence and terror—we will. But that’s not the only reason an antifascist component is necessary. I think we need it because antifascists can bring those experiences and those lessons into their organizing and into their community-based, community self-defense type work.

Fascism, for a long time, existed at the margins of politics. It was real, but people closer to the political center dismissed the threat of fascism. We clearly didn’t. We were fighting against it, organizing against it.

Jump to 2016: now fascism is in the air. It’s moved from the margins to the center. It’s now a central politic of today—or at least, far-right fascism broadly is a central politic to how we understand the world today.

But what does that mean if it’s not just a couple thousand people? What if it’s millions? That’s going to place a demand on antifascists to think, to reimagine the kinds of campaigns, coalitions, united fronts, and alliances that we need today.

Matthew: There are different kinds of antifascism. One of the things antifascism has to offer is that the debates which have taken place within antifascist circles and organizations are, in themselves, valuable.

It’s not that there’s a unified, well-worked-out strategy or set of tactics that we can implant somewhere. But some of the kinds of issues that have been points of disagreement and internal struggle are important. This is some of what we tried to address in the Three Way Fight book—particularly in the section on strategy, but also in other sections.

For example, Tammy Kovich’s essay  “Antifascism Against Machismo” (which is in the Three Way Fight book) looks at the baseline necessity of applying a feminist lens to understand not only fascism and the history of fascism, but also how we organize against it. There’s a need to recognize that an antifascist doesn’t look like just one kind of person. There are a lot of different kinds of people who can and do play valuable, essential roles in the struggle—and they need to be recognized. It’s not just street fighters. While, in certain contexts, that can be an important piece of what needs to happen, there’s so much more.

So how do we build a movement that is prepared to be militant but also prepared to organize and struggle in a lot of different ways—ways that are welcoming and supportive of lots of different kinds of people? 

Another piece in the book, “Tigertown Beats Nazis Down,” looks at the struggle in Auburn, Alabama, around Richard Spencer’s speech there eight years ago. There was a black bloc contingent present in a much larger mass of people. Folks from the Atlanta General Defense Committee (GDC) were part of that, and afterward, they looked very critically at the role they had played. It’s a very interesting kind of self-critical reflection on the limitations of black bloc politics as something that, while it can be valuable and important, can also be extremely limiting. In this instance, it came very close to really, really backfiring.

Again, it’s not that there’s this one single position. Rather, it’s about asking: what are those discussions? What are those debates? And how can we carry those forward so we don’t just go into this struggle with the idea that “everybody needs to do X”?

There are other examples of that too, such as the history of clinic defense work around reproductive freedom—which Suzy Subways wrote about in another essay we included in the book—and the need to look at the legacy of those kinds of struggles against the Christian right that sometimes get forgotten or treated as separate from antifascism, even though it’s really all of a piece.

Xtn: I think with the book, we wanted to present the specific histories of militant antifascism over the last 40 years in the U.S. and the role that the three way fight analysis has played in it. But we also wanted to expand the discussion beyond a kind of narrow antifascism to understanding how antifascists play roles in other struggles.

So we had a range of stuff — the George Floyd uprising and revolutionary anarchist and militant work in the struggle for reproductive freedom. We really wanted to have a more expansive view, to give people a hint of the various debates, but also practices and issues that, on the whole, the anti–far right and antifascist movements were dealing with.

In the mid-2010s there was this concept of community self-defense that was being argued for. And not that that phrase was new in terms of radical history — its previous best-known use was during the Black freedom struggles in the 1960s and ’70s in defense against police and Klan terror.

But in the 2010s, it was being renewed as a form of mass, outward politics and strategies for the defense of working classes, poor people, and those under attack by both the right and the state — including the Democratic Party, which was in power. And so, community self-defense was taken up by revolutionary unionists, antifascists, anti-eviction groups, and immigrant solidarity projects.

This idea of building this constellation of forces — this multi-layered and intersecting project and concept — those politics were instrumental to that round of struggles in the 2010s and early 2020s. And now we’re seeing that concept reemerge, especially in regards to the kind of broad, diverse, and from-below resistance to ICE. All over, people are talking about community self-defense.

There’s a whole range of projects and tactics and strategies, but it’s all part of this broader concept of this emerging community self-defense. It’s this key concept that’s being thought of, reimagined, and put into practice. And just like in the 2010s, community self-defense has this approach that aims at bringing together a broad gathering of sectors within society with the aim of a social kind of solidarity and resistance.

And I think for antifascists — smaller and specific political groupings and affinities that are part of our side — we have a role to play. But it does get back to this notion that we need a mass movement that can develop as a counterforce to the state and the system in its totality. We’ve been seeing this unfold in the anti-ICE movements. It’s still embryonic, and it’s all over the place, but it’s a positive development.

We haven’t seen anything on this scope since the George Floyd uprising. I mean, we saw glimpses of it with the Palestinian solidarity movement and the encampments and the disruptions and the protests and the shutdowns. But the other encouraging thing right now is we’re also seeing a convergence of the anti-ICE stuff with Palestinian solidarity. These are those moments that are so important, that we have to have our eyes open, and be involved, and be out in the mix when we’re thinking, and organizing, and being active.

SB: When interviewing different antifa groups from the Torch Network, I often heard that, at least before 2016, a lot of their campaigns were directed at people that had some purchase on the left. Conspiracy theorists in the antiwar movement, people on the fringes of the environmental movement, and so on. And while there were a lot of campaigns to fight back against open neo-Nazis and white nationalists, the biggest critical intervention was against fascist and far-right politics making its way into weak points of the left. So there is a sense in which the legacy of antifascism is in helping to evolve a leftist politic to see its own weak points and to resist reactionary ideas that enter as a supposed avenue to challenge state and capitalist hegemony.

Matthew: Right now, opposition to the Trump regime has been slow to get rolling, but there have been a lot of things happening. The people who are organizing the truly massive protests are groups like Indivisible and 50501. They’re liberals, and while they aren’t formally tied to the Democratic Party, they’re certainly very oriented toward it. In some ways, it’s pretty depressing — but the reality is, they’re doing real organizing, and they’re getting people out into the streets. This is part of our current reality.

So for me, one of the important questions is: how do we relate to this? How do folks on the left engage with this? Some people’s response is, “Don’t have anything to do with them. Leave them alone. Don’t support them in any way.” I don’t agree with that. I want to find ways to engage with those forces, with those gatherings, in ways that broaden the conversation, introduce more radical perspectives, and create opportunities to challenge liberal thinking and the Democratic Party’s orientation.

I also want to offer an alternative to vanguardist groups like PSL, which are sometimes the only other visible option people see. To me, that connects back to this question of how we build movements that are both militant and inclusive, that make space for radical voices without requiring people to already be radicals in order to participate. We’re not in a position to set those kinds of terms anyway.

It’s always easier to ask these questions than to provide clear answers. But I think it’s one of the most important questions to grapple with right now. And I believe that three way fight has something valuable to offer here, because these are the tensions and challenges we’ve been wrestling with for years. It’s just happening in a different context now. Ultimately, it’s still about navigating the relationship between advocating for systemic, liberatory change and building broad-based, diverse antifascist coalition work.