Counter-Aesthetics & American Fascism in Reel Time

The acceleration of MAGA fascism has been facilitated by aesthetics. In Trump’s second term, MAGA no longer hides its fascism behind aesthetics; instead it deploys aesthetics to propagandize for fascism. Brooks Turner analyzes MAGA’s aesthetic language, differentiating between aesthetic traps meant to obfuscate and aesthetic cues meant to inculcate.

By Brooks Turner

It is time to understand fascism as this country’s ongoing past and present. And, I think, we call it by its name rather than ever believing it as any misguided “patriotism.” Patriotism upholds a murderous racially capitalized patriarchal order that has been continuously maintained and perpetrated. These “patriots” are not an aberration, but the glue that allows the fully capitalized to thrive and continue to oppress.¹

—Dian Million, “Be like the wind—or better, like water: Resisting racial capitalism’s fascist forever wars” 

I.

For many, American fascism is not an impending crisis, but a historical and ongoing reality. Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities—alongside sections of the poor and working class—have long recognized the state as a site of fascist control.² Writing from her experience as a Tanana Athabaskan activist within the broader American Indian Movement, Dian Million notes, “Our vocabulary did not differentiate colonization from fascism. I think that considering what we now characterize as ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘settler colonialism’ we must recognize that colonization and fascism are deeply entwined projects.”³ This echoes Martiniquais philosopher and poet, Aimé Césaire: 

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the [Blacks] of Africa.⁴ 

Imperialism and settler colonialism are the roots of American fascism; its stem and branches are the hierarchies of capitalist exploitation based on race, gender, and class. Fascism deploys aesthetics the way plants use leaves to photosynthesize. Violence is the fruit grown with the energy generated by aesthetics. 

US fascism has been wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross for over a century. In 1933, inspired by Hitler’s rise to power, William Dudley Pelley founded the Silver Legion of America, a Christian nationalist political organization, driven to restore America to the true vision of the Founding Fathers—a vision only they could see. Much like Trump, Pelley used his experience as a writer in Hollywood to cultivate a charismatic persona that could capture disaffected white workers who felt betrayed by both government and cultural elites, while building financial relationships with robber barons. His literature—letters, pamphlets, books and magazines—circulated the country, stoking fear of “criminal aliens,” people of color, Jews, labor unions, communists, and other “undesirables.” Pelley used his literature to identify localities where his ideology was well received before dispatching lieutenants to organize supporters into small cells of Silvershirts. 

Pelley’s ultimate goal was to be an American Hitler. His aesthetics brought together Naziism, Americanism, Christianity, and Capitalism—aesthetics extremely similar to MAGA.⁵ Where Pelley failed to amass the degree of support needed to foment an insurrection, Trump succeeded—as we witnessed on January 6th, 2021. This is a new era of American Fascism, and a new framework of aesthetic world-building—but one that draws from an aesthetic well centuries old.

 By 1938, the Silver Legion had built a network spanning the nation, claiming 100,000 members across 22 states. While this figure is treated by historians as a gross overestimate, records in Minnesota at least show that Pelley’s sentiments were broadly tolerated, if not popular. Throughout the 1930s, Twin Cities newspapers published letters from readers in support of Hitler and decrying immigrants, evidence of fertile ground for Pelley’s fascism. Churches and police departments were used as recruiting grounds to build Silver Legion cells across the state. Rallies headlined by Silvershirt Lieutenant Roy Zachary drew hundreds, including some of the wealthiest Minnesotans—until Jewish anti-fascists and labor unions organized to drive them into hiding and out of the state. 

II. 

If fascists see cultural space as premeditating political ones, then the movement of fascists into cultural spaces is effectively political. If fascist public speech is intended to recruit and organize, then fascist public expression is indistinguishable from fascist organizing. If fascist organizing results in violence, whether explosions of “seemingly random” street violence, or genocide if they were to take power, then fascist organizing is fascist violence. Unlike other forms of revolutionary politics, fascism seeks to sanctify violence, built directly into their conception of identity and a correctly hierarchical society. Therefore, even the most muted fascist ideologue holds the kernels of brutality.⁶ —Shane Burley, “Twenty-Five Theses on Fascism”

On March 26, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted to social media a sinister video shot inside CECOT, the prison in El Salvador where DHS has disappeared a number of its victims. Comparisons between CECOT and Auschwitz proliferate on social media, but its aesthetics are more deeply American than they are Nazi. The Aryan occultism that fed Nazi spirituality and mythology is replaced in the American context with Christian Nationalist eschatology. 

Evangelicals are called to save the world from original sin by enforcing strict obedience to hierarchical rules; failure to obey is met with God’s judgement and Satan’s punishment. Followers of Trump are called to save America from its liberal sin by enforcing strict obedience to hierarchical rules; failure to obey is met with DHS’s judgement and El Salvador’s punishment. This distinction is important: this video does not show punishment; it shows judgement. Punishment comes after judgement. The punishment is life after deportation, life when the cameras stop rolling, whether that is in El Salvador, another foreign country, a domestic ICE blacksite, or a state prison. This mythology is very specifically Christian Nationalist: God is the arbiter of judgement; Satan is the arbiter of punishment. God hates Satan, yet God uses Satan to save His chosen people. This dynamic allows the Trump administration to disavow accountability for the violence perpetrated at CECOT, outsourcing brutality under the guise of “justice.”

Judgment is the language of both ethics and aesthetics. In order to judge something as good or bad—either morally or aesthetically—we synthesize a wide array of experience, information, and feeling into a belief that inspires decision. Because of this alignment, aesthetics impacts ethics, which bad actors exploit to manipulate and control people towards their authoritarian ends. Trump’s Whitehouse social media team captured the moment kidnapped immigrants were chained and forced onto planes, editing the footage into ASMR: media intended to trigger a pleasant and soothing tingling sensation. “Don’t worry,” the video conveys, “you can relax now that Trump is back. Our judgment is soothing.”  

In her posts from CECOT, Noem is dressed casually, seemingly in athleisure, contrasting the men in suits beside her. This aesthetic is repeated across Noem’s social media. She appears in casual clothing with only an ICE jacket or bulletproof vest bestowing authority—an aesthetic we have grown accustomed to seeing in videos of ICE abductions. Noem wants us to see her on the ground, in solidarity with those on the front line, not with the suits in Washington or the corporate class. She presents herself as the perfect everywoman to inculcate populist support from rural and working-class White Christian Americans, while disarming the violence of her position with beauty and casualism. 

ICE agents carry out their disappearances while in plain clothes, masked, their badges obscured, often without any identification other than a hat, a jacket or a vest—just like Kristi Noem. This casualism gives cover for vigilante terrorism. A recent meme circulating social media shows ICE lookalike vests available for sale through Amazon. With minimal effort, bad actors can masquerade as ICE, carrying out even more chaotic, extralegal violence. We are not meant to distinguish between state thugs and far right militias; they have been deputized by casual aesthetics, through which violence is normalized. The assassination of Minnesota State Congresswoman Mellisa Hortman and the attempted murder of several other politicians by a man masquerading as a cop tragically proved this true—yet nothing has been done in the weeks since to prevent this from happening again. 

Casual violence has a long history in American culture. Rampant consumerism and the military industrial complex means that no entertainment in the US is inert. Blockbuster films are funded and approved by the Pentagon; sporting events are framed as war games with collective displays of patriotism, honoring police and military. Sports culture in particular is thoroughly entangled with the aesthetics of American fascism. Consider the U.S. Bank Stadium, home of the Minnesota Vikings. Architecturally, it’s the perfect convergence of casual fascist aesthetics: the imperialist conquest of the Vikings meets the capitalist conquest of citizen “consumers,” a cold glass and steel cathedral to discipline and dominance, to war-allegories, processed food, and alcohol. Sports are not inherently fascist, but the underlying impulse of American fascism has leveraged ritualized aesthetics of loyalty, masculinity, and opposition to inculcate the average sports viewer into imperial capitalism. 

This is also how Hitler used the 1936 Summer Olympics. The Nazis borrowed aesthetic styles from Ancient Greece, using the origin of the games as a means to invite the outside world into a familiar space of aesthetics and history. But, contextualized alongside Nazi symbology, this collage of aesthetic references promoted the Aryan myth of cultural superiority, of Nazis descended from the great ancient cultures of the world. The event, regardless of the outcome for German athletes, functioned as propaganda for normalizing Naziism. 

Super Bowl LIX, the first major sporting event following Trump’s second inauguration, opened on heightened fascist aesthetics, using the National Anthem as backdrop for a battalion of cadets in grey uniforms, standing before a menacing bureaucratic, brick building, lights shining directly at the camera, obscuring details but projecting authority. Despite this clear fascist framing, the days following the Super Bowl saw numerous opinion pieces celebrating the collective opposition to Trump expressed in Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show and numerous advertisements that seemed to counter Trump’s divisive rhetoric. These opinion pieces are emblematic of a larger failure of aesthetic literacy. Image alone is not what makes an aesthetics—aesthetics is a complex entanglement between human creation, location, matter, judgement, and the social forces that emerge in relation. Lamar’s poetry was powerful, but it was sanctioned by corporate and political power, which defanged any real effect. The only real act of protest that occurred at the Super Bowl was when one of Lamar’s dancers abandoned his post and unfurled a banner for Gaza and for Sudan. 

Aesthetics that appeal to capital will always be ineffective in the fight against fascism.⁷ The Super Bowl advertisements that were celebrated as promoting the opposite values as Trump were not made with the intention of actually opposing fascism—they were made to sell goods, to generate profit for shareholders. As long as the profit motive dictates culture, our feelings become fodder for feeding the fascist machine. Sports and religion appeal to the human desire to belong, to feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself. The meaning we make of our lives generates from belonging; we use aesthetics to signal group allegiances and ethical orientations. The MAGA red hat is an immediate example, but laptops covered in stickers also tell stories of belonging through aesthetics. 

Belonging can either be defined through closed off, delineated categories or through open ended relation. The former is the territory of fascists who define ingroups and outgroups through aesthetics built on hate in order to justify the exploitation that must occur for the fascist hierarchy to sustain itself. What Trump and MAGA have shown is that hate need not be defined to be effectuated. Contempt, as an amorphous response to social disenfranchisement, can remain unspecified while being encouraged through irony and misdirection. 

In 2005, Matt Furie introduced Pepe the Frog in his Boy’s Club comic, depicting this humanized frog urinating while standing with his pants at his ankles. He twists his neck to look over his shoulder at another bathroom visitor; “feels good man,” Pepe advises. The confidence of this somewhat awkward act endeared him to internet subcultures who found acceptance through Pepe for their own idiosyncrasies. As Pepe endlessly reiterated across the internet, new versions became memes in their own rights—as if Pepe had become a language more than merely a symbol. 

As Pepe entered mainstream culture, the subculture that first saw itself in this character, attempted to reclaim Pepe with punk irony by making him “so offensive, it can’t be co-opted.” This tactic found sympathy on the message board 4chan, which had evolved, in the words of Dale Beran, a “culture of saying the most offensive thing.” However, by 2015, the irony had melted away, leaving Pepe as a violent symbol of the alt-right. The population of incels, Betas, NEATs, and other disaffected online 20-year-olds saw Trump as the live action Pepe—not Furie’s Pepe but the one that had been created in the feedback loop of 4chan. Within hours of Trump announcing his candidacy, a version of Pepe with Trump’s hair cemented this relationship, and message boards dedicated to Pepe became recruiting grounds for the far right. Reflecting on this in hindsight, Matt Baynard, a former campaign staffer for Trump, said “I think that President Trump is a real-life version of Pepe in the ability to elicit a reaction and to get attention, to express and to capture people’s hopes and fears. […] It gave people who had never really been in politics before, a way in.” In other words, Trump gave online subcultures of disaffected youth a politics they could belong to.⁸

Those who advance the aesthetics of belonging to fascism are advancing violence, as Shane Burley articulates in his “Twenty-Five Theses on Fascism”: “even the most muted fascist ideologue holds the kernels of brutality.” 

III. 

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

[…]

Our hearts know no weariness because they are
fed with fire, hatred, and speed!
—F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”⁹

The endless feed:  

A story told in text to speech, three words at a time heard over silent but soothing carpet cleaning—

In sepia tones, softly curving cartoon figures—an ICE agent and a migrant woman in handcuffs—depict a kidnapping in the style of Studio Ghibli—

A branch cut from a small tree, placed in cup of water, roots grow at double speed—

“If you deny it’s fascism, then you can imagine, okay, the normal pathways of politics are going to work, somehow things are going to self-correct. The moment you accept that it’s fascism, you have to organize. You have to take action. You have to organize. And you have to organize with people who agree with you and people who don’t completely agree with you—”¹⁰

Advertisement— 

Monkey on a bicycle—

Ms. Rachel singing and dancing and jumping with Rahaf, a three-year-old, double amputee medically evacuated from Gaza: “hop little bunny, hop hop hop—”

This is my algorithm, a fragmented fingerprint of my digital activity, no doubt shared by thousands of others but nonetheless specific to me. Faces appear and disappear; voices haunt images; there is no past nor future within the experience of the reel, only the present. 

Reels flatten, collapsing distinctions between information, entertainment, and politics. Worlds are compressed into short-form content for circulation across a network leveraged to enrich and empower the tech elite and capitalist shareholders. Our diminishing attention spans are fed a constant stream of dopamine through entertainment as long as our phones are charged and our fingers swipe—faster and faster and faster, always distracted, never bored.  

Past behavior is mapped by the machine so that the algorithm can anticipate each of our individual desires before we even realize what they are. Each swipe feels like a choice, but the algorithm is always a step ahead. Where linear time orders experience into before and after, Reel Time—the temporal space of the short form, social media video—collapses sequence into simultaneity. Temporality folds inward, spiraling through recursive emotions, looping endlessly. Soothing and horrifying in equal measure, social media trains us not to observe, not to process, not to examine, but to react—instantly, viscerally, algorithmically. 

Thus, Reel Time becomes a space of capture, privatizing desire to enclose the mind: our behavior is cataloged and categorized, then used to manipulate our future behavior through advertising and curated content. Each post’s contribution to social dialogue is defined by its ability to capture both audience attention and that of the algorithm. Social media and its algorithms exist to serve the interests of its owners, of the ruling class; the algorithm will allow content critical of social media, corporations, and capitalism more broadly, while orchestrating shadow bans and echo chambers to limit its reach. The same process of land enclosures which privatized the commons, now encloses our experience of reality, selling our worlds to advertisers and capturing what should be held in common.

The algorithm strives to keep us captured, to extract more and more engagement to sell to advertisers. It gives us an exaggerated sense of reality, making some parts of the world seem damned while others look like salvation. In his book, The Love of Destiny: The Sacred and the Profane in Germanic Polytheism, Dan McCoy defines monotheism as “the moralistic rejection of the world as we experience it as entirely and hopelessly profane, bereft of any meaning of its own, in favor of this ‘otherworld,’ which is the sole abode of anything that can rightly be called ‘sacred.’”¹¹ Divine law is given by God, who lives in a world—heaven—devoid of anything unclean. Our deviation from God’s law—from cleanliness—is decried sin, which through the myth of the Eden defines humanity. The world is damned and can’t be saved—we must seek salvation in another reality.

This aesthetic belief system—that the world we inhabit is disposable, profane, and subordinate to a higher order—is clear in Christian Nationalism, but it also applies to Capitalism. Capitalism declares itself the one true God for all humanity and demands that we put no other gods before him. As corporate power becomes increasingly tied to technological power and AI, our salvation is sold to us through subscriptions and swipes. Capitalism doesn’t quite declare the world damned, but it certainly pushes us to seek salvation in consumption and in digital space—the material requirements of which hasten ecological apocalypse. But the truth of this promised salvation is capture—manufacturing belonging and extracting value from our behavior.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher examines late-stage capitalism as a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that values “symbols of achievement over actual achievement.”¹² Fisher interprets Marx’s idea that communism comes after capitalism as the need to go all the way through capitalism. Capitalism must reach its conclusion, must undergo its own end. Given the adage, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, the way through capitalism feels like an impending apocalypse. And it is an apocalypse, but it need not be as bleak as that sounds: 

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.¹³

We might think of these “tiny events” as fragments of Reel Time that escape capture: a protest live-streamed, a dissenting voice that reaches millions, documentations of violence which exposes the falsity of official state narratives.

The US and Israel are carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. Before the advent of social media, this reality would remain suppressed behind media propaganda—as in the Philippines, Haiti, Korea, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya, undoubtedly among numerous others—and indeed the mainstream media continues to obfuscate the terror being perpetrated against Palestinians, mostly children. Yet, because of social media, because of the ubiquity of camera phones and the globalizing force of Capitalism, this genocide is being captured by its victims and digitally witnessed by the world. No one can say “we didn’t know” anymore. 

The very structures built to surveil and distract are being used to document and resist. Capitalism has given us the tools to propagandize for its own collapse. Even as neoliberal worldhood generates Reel Time, Reel Time cracks the neoliberal worldview, exposing the armatures of fascism underneath. This is the paradox of Reel Time, and perhaps one way through fascism. 

IV. 

I don’t think you can be part of any internationalism
if you’re not part of where you are.
—Meridel LeSueur

Throughout her life, writer, teacher, and labor activist Meridel LeSueur recorded interviews with labor organizers, focusing on Minnesota and the Midwest. In one tape, Harry Mayville tells of his involvement in various strikes, opening with the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike in Minneapolis. He describes workers mobilizing in the hundreds to discuss their methods for striking, adding a detail: “there used to be woods there,” presumably meaning where the strikers met. He describes a lookout on Highway 12 reporting trucks approaching Minneapolis, a car blocking the trucks to slow them, and hundreds of workers gathering branches and cutting trees from the woods to block the roads.

When the first truck hit the barricade of branches, it skidded off the road, tipping its trailer and sending thousands of eggs scattering. “Well, there was a lot of free eggs there, I can tell you right now. The people who were out there had eggs for a few days, a few weeks maybe.”¹⁴ Resistance became sustenance—made even more significant in the midst of the depression. Given that imperialism and capitalism have driven the destruction of the landscape, this method of striking can be seen as a collaboration between land and workers to oppose their joint exploitation under industrialized settler colonialism. “There used to be woods there” is more than a description; it poetically ties land stewardship to labor stewardship.

Dian Million describes Indigeneity as a practice of “governance, ontologically and epistemologically lived within places that are not imagined as static.” Every indigeneity is different, emerging “within a set of relations that are material, spiritual and dynamic,” yet a rhythm of orientation towards entanglement makes indigeneity “a global practice in living that liberal humanism / racial capitalism has tried to eradicate from Earth for over 500 years.”¹⁵

Édouard Glissant defines Relation as a poetics, a process of connection, entanglement, and a refusal of reduction that:

— is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures;

— is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not the hidden violence of filiation;

— does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended;

— does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.¹⁶

The aesthetics of fascism—hierarchical, possessive, supremacist, and singular—are rooted in that which Relation denies. Thus, through Relation, we find a counter-aesthetics that opposes and rejects fascism, while articulating a worldview that is adaptive, generative, localized yet international—an orientation like Million’s definition of Indigeneity.

Glissant, writing from the Caribbean, from its history of violence and perseverance, its reality of cultural entanglement, addresses, in the words of John Drabinski, “the question of how we are to work with the cultural, metaphysical, and epistemological fragmentation produced by forced migration.” He continues:

Dis-location breaks the past apart, lifting from a living context and into the realm of memory (which is then subjected to the problem of trauma and traumatic remembrance); re-location places new demands on that memory for imagining a future […]. The past is bound in new ways to the present—traces in memory, with or without original presences—and the question of how to best imagine the future against the oppressive, melancholic weight of the present is raised with special urgency.¹⁷

Glissant takes seriously the imagination as a force in the world: “The world’s poetic force (its energy) kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being.”¹⁸ The whorls of past and possibility emanate from the specific imagination of a place—its people and its land. History and identity are always aesthetically “derived from a specific geography of thinking, being, and creating.”¹⁹ Fascism defines itself through these aesthetics, manipulating history and identity into a singular monolithic myth of hierarchy, to which the world is subservient. Relation, as a counter-aesthetics, is horizontal, chaotic, polyvalent, local, and open. Aesthetics become ethics, and Relation converges onto direct democracy and stateless confederalism.

While the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike had clear organizing leaders, the governing body—named the Committee of 100—was made up of democratically elected representatives from each of the companies affected by the strike. Regular meetings open to all rank-and-file workers gave every voice a platform for expression and encouraged robust debate. Beyond the union, strike leaders organized the unemployed—about 30,000 in Minneapolis, one third of the workforce at the time—into councils that could represent their collective interests and leverage their power. These unemployed workers helped staff the field hospital, commissary, and pickets, actively participating in the strike, making it harder for the business leaders to find scabs. Farmers from across the state brought donations to the commissary, while other local union shops denied their services to the trucking businesses, precipitating a general strike. Even though the strike established hierarchies of leadership, they were democratically constructed from an overarching horizontal armature—a topography of power more like a landscape than a pyramid. 

The national organizers dispatched to Minneapolis to unionize the truck drivers went on to found the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist political organization based in New York, but with its largest membership in Minnesota. The state had strong left-wing representation in the Farmer-Labor Party, a base which a vanguard might begin to push towards revolution. In Spring of 1938, local organizer and strike leader Vincent Ray Dunne traveled to Mexico with Max Shachtman and James Cannon—two of the 1934 strike organizers and founders of the SWP—to study worker organizing with Leon Trotsky.

A year earlier, Shachtman had assisted Diego Rivera in securing Trotsky’s safe passage into exile in Mexico. In addition to funding, the Minneapolis Truck Drivers sent rank-and-file workers to Frida Kahlo’s home in Coyoacán to guard Trotsky from Stalin’s assassins. This moment in 1938 represents a convergence of artists, revolutionaries, and labor organizers—a historical model of relational resistance in which aesthetics, politics, and place-based solidarity intertwined. The fragments that remain of this moment—three partially transcribed conversations, Trotsky’s writings such as “Art and Politics in Our Epoch” and “The Transitional Program,” artworks by Rivera and Kahlo, the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” signed by Rivera and French Surrealist André Breton—offer archival evidence of Relational resistance to hierarchy, nationalism, capitalism, and the erasure of difference.

Following the Mexican Revolution, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera both celebrated indigeneity in their work as part of the effort to redefine national cultural and political identity as a post-colonial entanglement of African, Indigenous, and European cultures. Kahlo’s 1938 painting What the Water Told Me dances between her past and that of Mexican culture as a whole. Her mixed heritage—German, Spanish, and Indigenous—her pain and resilience, her creativity, collage together into an imperfect and incomplete representation of a national identity which survived the violence of conquest and colonization while still projecting into the future, united in multiplicities. Rivera’s work had long been politically motivated in its depictions of both indigenous practices and social uprising, but in 1934 Rivera directly depicted Trotsky alongside Max Shachtman and James Cannon in his masterpiece Man, Controller of the Universe, together carrying the banner of the 4th International. At the time of painting, Shachtman and Cannon were in Minneapolis, organizing Truck Drivers. 

It’s impossible to know if or how much Rivera and Kahlo affected the Minneapolis Truck Drivers. Rivera appears briefly in one transcribed conversation from 1938, but little else remains to directly connect the artists to the labor organizers. Yet the transcripts show significant time paid to pedagogy and propaganda—how to teach workers about socialism and how to frame the rhetoric and imagery associated with organizing.²⁰ Particular focus was paid to the formation of a vanguard party and workers militia in Minneapolis. Minneapolis alone seemed to have a broad enough base of leftwing populist support to inspire a Trotskyist uprising—and until then, the militia could be used to defend unions and attack fascists. Upon his return to Minneapolis, Dunne shared what he had learned and the Truck Drivers created the Union Defense Guard, electing Ray Rainbolt, a Dakota veteran of World War One, to lead their militia.

Late summer 1938 saw a dramatic increase in fascist organizing as the 1938 gubernatorial election approached. The Silver Legion of America had increased its activity, hosting rallies that drew hundreds of participants, including some of Minneapolis’ wealthiest individuals who had lost the 1934 Strike and were looking for revenge. Silvershirt lieutenant Roy Zachary, addressing one of these rallies, called for vigilante bands to raid union headquarters, “declaring that the time for the ballot was passed,”²¹ clearly instigating fascist violence against workers. But the Union Defense Guard (UDG) was ready with a network of spies and a practiced battalion capable of organizing in under an hour. In his book, Teamster Politics, Farrell Dobbs recounts a story of deployment against fascist organizing when one of its spies—a cab driver—reported to Rainbolt that he had just picked up William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Legion of America, from the train station and was on his way to a rally at Calhoun Hall. According to Dobbs, Rainbolt called the venue and threatened that they would have trouble if Pelley was allowed to speak. He then mobilized a section of the UDG, which converged on the Hall and drove off the fascist sympathizers who had assembled there. Pelley never showed up, and later another cab driver called to inform Rainbolt that Pelley had been returned to the train station and departed Minneapolis for Chicago. The Silvershirts were unable to organize openly in Minneapolis again. 

Fifty years later, a group of punk skinheads calling themselves The Baldies built an anti-fascist movement, studying the Union Defense Guard’s tactics in order to drive neo-nazi skinheads out of Minneapolis. In the 1980s, Minneapolis was home to one of the most popular neo-nazi punk bands, which emboldened a gang called the White Knights to openly wear swastikas and other Nazi insignia while terrorizing non-white neighborhoods. The Baldies aggressively organized against these neo-nazis, pressuring record stores to stop selling racist music, barring nazis from punk shows, and threatening violence against anyone wearing nazi symbols. Their aesthetic styling—black and red, shaved heads, Doc Martens, and thin suspenders—became non-uniform uniforms for anti-fascist organizing. 

In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mark Bray recounts a story of a particularly effective tactic utilized by the Baldies: 

“Hey, are you part of the White Knights?” a young Native American skinhead graffiti artist named Gator shouted across the street to a young white skinhead. Gator crossed the street alongside his sixteen-year-old sidekick, Kieran, and asked again, “Are you a White Knight?” […]

“Yes, I am,” the kid responded. 

Taking a step closer Gator explained that the next time he saw him, the answer had better be “No.” 

Thirty years later, Kieran²² marveled at this strategy that “gave teens a chance to think about their stance and let them know that it carried consequences . . . it gave them fair warning.” In fact, this strategy caused several white-power skins to switch over to the Baldies crew—an outcome that would have been far less likely had they been attacked immediately. This is a story about violence where punches were not thrown, about how making the consequences of racism known at the outset can nip white power in the bud.²³ 

The recent Twin Cities PBS documentary Anti-Racist Skinheads Fighting Nazis: The Baldies interviewed one such convert from the White Knights, who remarked on the importance of aesthetics to his change. It wasn’t just the threat of violence, it was also the appeal of the Baldies’ aesthetic, the desire to be part of how the Baldies carried and oriented themselves toward anti-fascist, local, polyvalent community. 

Following Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher began exploring a political orientation he called Acid Communism: a speculative reimagining of historical moments in which the counterculture of the 60s became entangled with the labor movement. Acid Communism was unfinished after Fisher took his own life, but it remains full of potential, of aesthetics, of organizing, and resistance: 

The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life.

Acid communism both refers to actual historical developments and to a virtual confluence that has not yet come together in actuality. Potentials exert influence without being actualised. Actual social formations are shaped by the potential formations whose actualisation they seek to impede. The impress of “a world which could be free” can be detected in the very structures of a capitalist realist world which makes freedom impossible.²⁴

Fisher is not advocating for drug use to save the world—he is clear that this was already tried and failed with hippie counterculture in how it amplified toxic individualism. Rather, culture and aesthetics function as a process for broad consciousness raising, which capitalism fears more than anything else. Group consciousness is not a registry of truth or fact, it’s the formation of a group identity—more akin to the cultivation of a shared myth that gives collective meaning. 

Glissant struggled with (not against) the concept of the myth. He identified its danger in ethnogenesis and its demand for singular allegiance. Yet simultaneously, he understood myth as a tool for generating identity. Myth is an expression of group consciousness that draws from history while also projecting into the future. A myth is always incomplete because it inspires continued action, always speculative because it engages shared feelings of the world. At its core, fascism engages myth in order to capture broad populist support. It gives the fascist project appeal by generating belonging for the in-group, which leads to violence against the out-group. Myth rooted in filiation ultimately facilitates fascism. Glissant called for the creation of a myth for the Caribbean, one that could capture its violent history without replicating it, one that could preserve, celebrate, and project the multiplicity of identities that exist across this archipelago of land and experience, one that could envision an alternate future for the entire world without making the world singular. A Relational myth is adaptive and localized, while existing within a broad (decon-)structural framework. 

Aesthetics helps to generate belonging while myth helps to organize group consciousness. These histories of the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike, the meeting of Rivera, Kahlo, Cannon, Shachtman, Dunne, and Trotksky, the Union Defense Guard, and the Baldies are chapters in a rewriting of local mythology towards Acid Communism. While I do not know of a direct ideological or material connection between these histories and the Minneapolis Uprising following the murder of George Floyd, the aesthetic language of resistance employed during the Uprising makes it part of this mythology too.²⁵

The radical anti-capitalism of the Uprising was almost immediately co-opted by corporate agendas, even as the corporate owner class boarded up its buildings and abandoned community. Even before Trump’s reelection, corporations had been quietly abandoning the DEI initiatives they put into place to placate consumers. With Trump’s reelection and the broad turn away from any worldview that threatens profit in a time of ICE raids, live streamed genocide, and neo-robber barons, this has only accelerated. I read acid in Acid Communism, not only as an allusion to the alteration of mind through psychedelic opening, but as a force that dissolves hierarchical structures of control into pools of potential. Reel Time in this regard has an acidity to it, the potential to dissolve corporate enclosed digital space and recreate it as a commons, a place where ideas can be freely shared, where dialogue can occur across boundaries and borders, where neighborhoods exist both online and in space. 

On a number of occasions, Brandon Schorch, the combating Hate Organizer with Jewish Community Action, has commented to me and on his social media that there’s a buzz to our current moment, one like the moment preceding the Uprising, but a buzz that might take us further than 2020. This palpable feeling is aesthetic attunement to group consciousness in genesis; we have the power to shape it through Relation in opposition to MAGA fascism. 

Footnotes

1. Dian Million, “Be like the wind—or better, like water: Resisting racial capitalism’s fascist forever wars,” in For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis, ed. Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022), 209.
2.  It is worth noting that there have been moments in which the state has functioned as a lever of progress. The structures of US institutions throughout history have meant that the state often remains a site of fascist control even while advancing some progressive reforms. 
3.  Million, 206
4.  Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36.g Fathers—a vision only they could see. Much like Trump, Pelley used his experience as a writer in Holl
5.  I explore this in greater detail in “American Fascism as Aesthetic Experience: Identifying the symbols and myths of fascism as a warning sign for its political actions”: https://mnartists.walkerart.org/american-fascism-as-aesthetic-experience 
6.  Shane Burley, “Twenty-Five Theses on Fascism,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Institute for Anarchist Studies, November 30, 2017, https://anarchiststudies.org/25-theses-on-fascism/
7.  I discuss the correlation between Capitalism and fascism in more detail in “Pedagogy and Propaganda: A Manifesto for Anti-Fascist Education,” https://mnartists.walkerart.org/pedagogy-and-propaganda-a-manifesto-for-anti-fascist-education 
8.  Feels Good Man, dir. Arthur Jones (United States: Ready Fictions/Wavelength; distributed by Giant Pictures, 2020), 92 min.
9.  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” (Le Figaro, February 20, 1909; originally published in Gazzetta dell’Emilia, Bologna, February 5, 1909), republished on Italian Futurism, accessed June 11, 2025, https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

Futurism was an Italian art movement that propagandized for fascism and and retained ties with Mussolini throughout his reign. 

10.  Timothy Snyder, Harkaudio, disseminated as a reel on Instagram
11.  Dan McCoy, The Love of Destiny: The Sacred and the Profane in Germanic Polytheism (self-published via CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 20. It’s worth noting that Polytheist symbols have long been appropriated by fascists and supremacists, but their manner of appropriation tends to be monotheistic, using the symbols to establish a singular root of ethnogenesis. Further, there are many “monotheisms” which don’t behave in the manner McCoy describes; one might find polytheistic aesthetics embedded within these alternative monotheisms. McCoy’s generalization is useful because it identifies the potential violence of singularity and its relation to the overarching power monotheistic religions have exercised in order to conquer both land and people. 
12.  Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 48-49.
13.  Fisher, 87-88. 
    
14. Harry Mayville, interviewed by Meridel Le Sueur, undated cassette tape. Digitized MP3 Audio: https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-finding-aids-public/library/findaids/00323.html?pagewanted=all. 
15. Million, 211-212. 
16. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 144. 
17. John E .Drabinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), [page number]. 
18. Glissant, 159
19. John E. Drabinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 162.
20. A version of these transcripts was published by the Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/04/lp.htm. See also Turner, “Pedagogy and Propaganda: A Manifesto for Anti-fascist Education.” 
21.  “Labor Hater Belden with Silver Shirts,” Minneapolis Labor Review, August 5, 1938.
22. Kieran Knutson is now President of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis 
23. Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2017), 167-168.
24. Mark Fisher, K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), ed. Darren Ambrose, foreword by Simon Reynolds (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 781-82. 
25. I explore this in greater depth in “On Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising”: https://tempmpls.com/art-and-artifact