I’ve been following this for a while, but the most recent impetus for writing this post came from listening to the Oct 19 Vergecast episode ‘Kanye wants Parler, smartwatch showdown, and the Vergecast Hotline returns’ yesterday, specifically the section from 2:15 - 24:44. Hopefully this catches people up on what fascists are doing; and adds some useful analysis.
The far right has difficulty staying on capitalist social media platforms and within the liberal-capitalist internet stack. New companies are being created with the help of funding from right-wing billionaires, to get around the liberal capitalist constraints that exist on the internet tech stack. Fascists are building the physical internet infrastructure necessary for them to spread their hateful messages over the internet.
In the face of these fascists’ success, how is the left pushed to develop our analysis of building alternative “dual power” in the economy? The left has been trying to build dual power for a long while, and fascists have achieved massive leaps relatively quickly—mostly because fascists have access to deep pockets of capital. Obviously, the left does not have this access to capital, so what should we do instead? Is there anything to learn from their real life success in seemingly building an alternative economy?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about…
Donald Trump got banned from Twitter and Facebook, and after Kanye’s recent outburst on Twitter promoting Anti-Semetic conspiracy theories, Kanye was also banned. In the aftermath, Trump moved to the Twitter clone Truth Social, and Kanye may have been convinced to buy Parler, another “pro-free-speech” Twitter clone. Elon Musk has bought Twitter with the stated desires to make it a place for free speech as defined by the government of the location the Twitter user is in, to remove bots, and—in revealed texts—to unban Donald Trump. Andrew Tate, a misogynistic manosphere influencer, has been banned across essentially every mainstream social media platform—YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Internet companies—cloud service providers, website hosting platforms, DDOS protection services—have also made political decisions to drop the worst of the right wing internet sites. The Neo-Nazi news website The Daily Stormer, and 8chan, a forum popular with a white supremacist and Neo-Nazi crowd, have each been dropped by their website hosts and DDOS protection services. Apple and Google have also made the decision to remove Truth Social and Parler from their iOS / Android app stores (although these apps have been making returns after creating greater content moderation).
Truth Social now exists on a right-wing internet service provider, RightForge. Parler, following its failure to capture a user base, has mostly pivoted into Parlement Technologies, with a similar business model of right-wing cloud services. They are explicitly trying to build an “uncancellable” set of internet services.
Other right-wing website clones have also popped up in response to liberal-capitalist content moderation. Payment processing and credit card companies have appeared to try to skirt around the financial stack’s ability to cut off fascists from receiving money. Gab and Gettr are also social media clones, with Gettr recently introducing a TikTok clone to their platform. Rumble is a right-wing YouTube clone which now hosts Andrew Tate, Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, and Alex Jones’ InfoWars, and has expanded to include other heterodox influencers like Russell Brand. Even dating apps have tried to get in on the conservative branding.
Beyond social influence on the internet, right wingers have started news companies like One America News Network (OANN), which pushes the window further right beyond Fox News. Right wing anti-woke companies have also started up, like Black Rifle Coffee, and many of these are the advertisers which help fund right-wing social media websites.
Analyzing the fascists’ parallel economy strategy
A right-wing payment processing company tried to copyright the phrase “parallel economy” to represent their overall strategy, which superficially echoes the calls on the left to build “dual power”. There are clear differences between the left’s desires for dual power, and the fascist/conservative alternative economy. Both want to break away from liberal capitalism, but in significantly different ways.
The left wants a more democratic economy, so to us, “dual power” means to build democratic economic institutions which will support the left movement and eventually replace the capitalist economy. The main examples of left dual power institutions are worker and tenant cooperatives, and community banking that will help seed the funding for those ventures.
The right wants more social influence—they don’t care about overthrowing capitalism. They are reacting in response to how their messages have been rejected and deplatformed by monopolies and tendencies in liberal-capitalist companies. But fascists don’t simply want to build alternatives—when they have power, they also want to destroy liberal-capitalist institutions which provide fact-checks and dampen the fascists’ lies.
The left cares about changing the material relationships involved in production, and believe that sustainable, true social change will come from that. Fascists care about having dominance in how capitalist production is used socially, so they can support and spread their fascist ideology. The left is materially rooted; fascists are socially rooted.
Does the Left have anything to learn from this?
Of course, fascists are clearly taking material actions to build internet infrastructure and social media alternatives for conservatives. Is there anything the left can learn from their material success?
My first instinct is to say that we don’t have much to learn. Here, I focus on two areas: initial funding, and internal structure.
Initial funding is the major roadblock for building most leftist dual power institutions—fascists have funding essentially handed to them by billionaires like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. Truth Social, while being a financial failure, is buoyed up by rich ideologues—they owe RightForge $1.6 million in hosting fees, which RightForge has mostly been eating because of their ideological alignment. All this capital allows many of these fascist alternative companies to fail, and still have some which succeed. The left, structurally, seems like we do not have access to this magnitude of capital, except perhaps through strategies of government contracts getting directed to worker-owned cooperatives.
With regards to internal structure, the left has nothing to learn. Right-wing companies are structured in the same capitalist hierarchy as regular capitalist companies—with a CEO at top, and a clear difference between workers and owners. The main difference between right-wing companies and traditional companies are that the right-wing companies have clear conservative ideological motivations above and beyond the immediate profit motive.
That was my first instinct understanding of the situation, but there are a couple more observations I’d like to add.
The fascists have mobilized a wide group of people, not simply the rich billionaires. A lot of working class people have been looped into Truth Social because they believe they have a patriotic, moral duty to use the platform. Working class folks buy from companies like Black Rifle Coffee, indirectly helping to fund the rest of the conservative alternative economy through that. (But my guess is that the bulk of funding still comes from investments by members of the capitalist class.)
These are not new lessons for leftists, but it emphasizes the validity of what we’ve already known:
Our left dual power alternatives need to materially support each other. We should try our hardest to prevent the little funding we have from getting siphoned off by outside capitalists. Second, leftists have a lot of people. Small donor funding at a mass scale seems like a viable way to get funding, and we should make strategies around that.
Already, banking options are a focus of Cooperative movements; the Mondragon Cooperative and the Preston Model focus on having cooperatives support each other and keeping the exchange of money internal to the cooperative system as much as possible; and the worker cooperative Comradely provides a promising worker-owned alternative to Patreon. The Democracy Policy Network has a range of promising projects for funding democratic economic alternatives, from public banks to community accelerators.
We might even look at how part of the appeal of these right-wing companies is how people use them to signal that they identify with a movement. The left might decide that we want our messaging to lean into how our dual power economies are explicitly for the purpose of promoting the interests of the working class—which I believe is ultimately a winning message.