Millions of people are thinking about how to build the resistance, about how they can become active in fighting the second Trump administration’s plans to facilitate and impose fascism.

In the process, some folks confuse sounding as radical as they want and feel with having the biggest impact on real world developments. It is important to have a clear idea of what is effective — what will reach, motivate, activate, and inspire the most people. Otherwise, we can spin our wheels being very active in ways that are not effective in reaching our goals.

In order to build a movement massive enough and united enough to be capable of stopping fascism, we need to build a movement that endeavors to speak to millions, that endeavors to build a majority movement, that endeavors to have the most real world impact.

First, we need to be very clear about what the real situation is. For example, many of the people around Trump — his advisors, his enablers, and his funders — are out-and-out fascists. And come late January, many of them will be in positions of power.

However, that does not mean we will immediately have a full-blown fascist government.

We must distinguish between what Trump and his ilk want on the one hand, and what we can stop them from accomplishing on the other. While we still have the ability to engage in struggle on many fronts, we need to take advantage of them.

The resistance will take many forms and will battle it out with the fascists on many fields of struggle.

The reality is that there is still considerable room for democratic resistance. That resistance will take many forms and will battle it out with the fascists on many fields of struggle. There will be legal battles, legislative battles, strikes, boycotts, petition campaigns, postcard campaigns, electoral battles, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and there will be personal acts of resistance.

We need to oppose each and every effort to restrict or eliminate voting rights, civil rights, union rights and other workers’ rights. We need to stand against every attack on women’s health care rights; on the right to a full, complex, and truthful education. These are just a few of the areas where resistance is essential to prevent further erosion of all those rights won through struggle over many decades.

Some people, often those only recently radicalized, feel that the most revolutionary way to act is to sound the most radical, to wave the biggest red flag, to turn the bullhorn volume up to 11. They posit a false hierarchy of actions in which passive resistance is almost worthless, with increasingly militant actions like demonstrations being better, and civil disobedience being even more desirable. Within this paradigm, armed struggle is presented as the best and highest form of resistance. Such a viewpoint ends up cutting them off from the very millions of people who will determine the outcome of the titanic struggles ahead.

These super-radicals have an oversimplified view of developing strategy. They correctly see that Trump poses a fascist threat, supported by billionaires and white supremacists. They correctly argue that fierce resistance is necessary. And for such sectarians, they think they have then reached the end of strategic development. They sponsor small, sectarian demonstrations and coalitions. They focus on slogans. They argue for being more militant, regardless of circumstances. But such sectarianism will lead us down the path to becoming irrelevant, driving potential allies away, and providing the MAGA right with excuses for increased repression.

Working with groups having this type of orientation, however socialist or Marxist they purport themselves to be, cannot help us build our own ties with mass movements. Many people, especially those new to socialism and communism, feel that self-described Marxists of all stripes should somehow unite around a common approach. Then, they imagine, the socialist movement will be strengthened and have a wider impact. But sectarian groups are wedded to what they see as a “principled,” uncompromising commitment to narrow paths. These organizations have fundamental differences on questions of strategy with our approach of working to reach millions. If we tied ourselves in common cause with them, it would lead us in the direction of becoming as isolated as our would-be allies. It would put our work in the mass movements off to some future moment when “Left” unity has finally been achieved, and prevent us from building influence with those millions who are in struggle now around the immediate issues facing our class and people.

None of this is meant to give the idea that taking initiative with small demonstrations should be discredited under all circumstances. The first demonstrations against the War in Vietnam in Seattle in the early 1960s, for example, were attended by only 40 or 50 people, half of them members of the CPUSA. However, the goal was always to expand the movement. By the end of the 1960s, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Seattle demonstrations had 6–7 thousand participants, and by the early 1970s, national demonstrations reached into the hundreds of thousands.

The goal of the smaller demonstrations was to reach millions, and the movement succeeded in doing so. Once the level of hundreds of thousands was reached, the movement began to have a major impact on national politics. It reached the level of speaking to millions, and creating coalitions that organized those millions. The movement engaged on many fields of struggle — legal, legislative, street demonstrations, civil disobedience, and electoral.

Our goals now must be to build a movement of millions, to build organizations and coalitions capable of mobilizing millions. That means rejecting efforts to divert the movement into narrow, dead-end avenues.

This is not an argument against militancy. However, I suggest that the question needs to be asked, “Militancy in service of what goal?” Militancy for its own sake doesn’t end up uniting millions, it doesn’t end up impacting national policy, and it doesn’t end up with the most effective movement against fascism.

That movement needs to start with winning workers and their unions. It starts with picking slogans, demonstrations, and other resistance that inspire millions. The reality is that the election of Trump did not prove some kind of major shift to the right — Trump’s margin of victory was less than 1.5%. But the fascists did win many major positions of power in all three branches of the federal government. They won the initiative. We will therefore have to play defense against their efforts to deport millions of people and to tear families apart, and to limit, restrict, and chip away at all democratic rights. We must oppose the plans to use the military in the streets of the U.S.

But it is not opposition just for the hell of it. It is not resistance to prove how pure and revolutionary we are. Opposition and resistance must have the goal of winning enough people to actually stop the efforts of the fascists. It must have the goal of winning those who voted Democratic to be ready to be more militant, to engage in struggle all year around, not just during an election season. It must be able to also mobilize and attract those non-voters and third-party voters who are disillusioned and angry with the system, winning them over to a strategic, mass struggle and popular unity outlook. It must even be ready to reach out to those Trump voters who become angry when the administration overreaches in implementing its anti-popular agenda, winning them over to an anti-racist and anti-sexist democratic outlook. It must have the goal of speaking to the everyday needs of workers, poor people, and the oppressed. It must have the goal of building a mass base that is large enough, militant enough, and organized enough to actually stop and reverse the slide into full-blown fascism.

That might not sound as radical as calling for an immediate revolution. But in terms of real-world impact, a less-radical sounding, but much more massive movement has a more radical, revolutionary impact.

Our strategy must not end with just seeing the fascist danger and mounting a pro-forma resistance. It must go further, to reaching millions. How will we get there? Emphasizing the differences between radicals and the majority will not do the trick. We must seek out unity with the majority.

We already know that millions are ready to resist — the questions become how to effectively reach, involve, and organize those millions, how to reach those who feel like they can’t make a difference, and how to encourage those who are rightfully scared of the risks of struggle, especially with the looming threat of fascism.

Small sectarian coalitions and demonstrations might sound and feel more radical, but, intentionally or not, they draw us away from our main tasks, from our focus on creating real change rather than just shouting slogans.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Image: Women’s march against Donald Trump by Fibonacci Blue (CC BY 2.0); Anti War Protest 1967 – Washington DC USA by TommyJapan1 (CC BY 2.0), colorized using palette.fm; Amazon Teamsters on strike! by Amazon Teamsters (X)

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