Feeding People Is A Way To Fight Fascism

Photo by Jorge Zapata on Unsplash

Every day, fascism is slowly creeping in. Departments of the government are being purged and replaced with die-hard loyalists. Genocidal rhetoric (and policy) is being advanced that seeks to exterminate minorities such as transgender people (see Surprisingly, This Is What a Trans Genocide Looks Like). It's a scary time to be alive.

It might be challenging to think of what to do about all this, especially since so many well-worn strategies have already failed to fight the rise of fascism in the United States. As I have argued in the past:

“Trump has once again ascended to power. All that stands in his administration’s way is an ineffectual Democratic Party, a nonprofit scene beholden primarily to wealthy donors, leftist influencers building up their brands, grassroots groups holding on by the skin of their teeth, and, god willing, Donald Trump’s own incompetence. It’s safe to say that this strategy of strengthening liberal institutionalism has failed us in stopping the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.”

I have instead advocated for a community-based approach (see You Can Stop the Collapse of Democracy by Finding Your People) that involves focusing on making in-person connections. The last piece I published in this, I guess, emerging series involved disaster prep (see We Need To Talk To Our Neighbors About Disasters).

Today, I want to focus on the importance of feeding people in your group or community.

It reduces fascism on a macro level

Food is something we all need, but far too many lack access to it. If you don’t have entitlements to food and water, defined more broadly than just purchasing power, then you will starve — regardless of how much food and water is actually stockpiled (see Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famine, which, although consistently criticized, is a concept that has more or less held up).

One can argue that this artificial scarcity is wrong, and maybe that is a strong enough reason for you (it is for me), but another prominent aspect is that hunger has a debilitating effect on our society. Hungry people are stuck in a perpetual state of fight or flight, which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making. I am a layperson, so I encourage you to read up on the sources I have linked, but from what I can gather, hunger has a profound impact on increasing someone's impulsivity and making them more likely to cash in on short-term incentives.

All of us are affected by this, as it manifests in higher crime, increased illness, and the pitfall we are talking about today: fascism.

The thing fascism often thrives on is the instabilities of capitalism. Fascists have a long history of taking advantage of economic anxieties to gain power (see the hyperinflation of Germany). They redirect the socioeconomic majority’s anxieties surrounding such problems toward the wrong solution, scapegoating ethnic, racial, gender, religious minorities, and so forth, instead of the political actors who have removed their entitlements to food and water.

In other words, fascism is a cruel promise by those at the top of the hierarchy to punish scapegoats for this decline in the socioeconomic majority's standard of living. It is a politics of retribution that has only one thread connecting it to reality: that people’s lives are worse.

It's what happened in my country. The United States has always been a parasitic economy built on stealing the time and labor of others, quite literally, with the slave trade and apartheid of Black Americans, as well as the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. This extraction has accelerated to the point that it has even hollowed out former beneficiaries of this racist system. Much of the wealth the white socioeconomic majority had has been now concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, causing people who used to be able to survive on mediocrity alone to suffer.

Trump has tapped into the racial and patriarchal resentment of this downwardly mobile socioeconomic majority and redirected many of them toward a convenient list of enemies: migrant people, trans people, and Black and brown people. It was easier for this majority to blame these people (not to mention such scapegoats affirmed preexisting biases from centuries of propaganda) than it was for them to do the difficult work of uprooting the capitalists and their armies, who had actually degraded their entitlements to food and water.

That work required not only unlearning such biases but also opening oneself up to danger, as most revolutionary action is clamped down on pretty violently by the state.

It's a simplification to say that feeding people will stop everyone in this bucket from becoming a fascist and bring them over toward revolutionary or even anti-fascist action. There are plenty of fascists with full bellies, especially capitalist fascists, who support the ideology for political and economic gain. Some people will not change their minds, and it is okay to let them go (see You Don’t Have to be Friends with the Conservatives Who Hate You).

Yet, even though it is not a silver bullet, it is a prerequisite that will limit the desperation for some. We want to get as many people out of the permanent state of flight or flight of hunger as possible, as it reduces (though does not guarantee) the likelihood that such persons, especially those from a downwardly mobile socioeconomic majority, will fall into the pit of fascism.

And so, if you need a practical, non-altruistic justification to feed others, this is it: people with full bellies are less likely to rush into the simplistic and false solution of fascism.

It builds community

On a more micro level, the reason you may want to focus on feeding people is that it is critical for jumpstarting community.

You cannot really have a community in the long term without first finding a way to feed the people who show up for it. “What are we going to eat and drink?” are among the first questions that pop up when a group of people come together because they are our basic needs.

I cannot emphasize enough how the groups that manage to pull a consistent amount of people for an action are the ones who bother to feed the people who show up. Whether we are talking about a picket line serving coffee and pastries to protestors, a training for a sit-in laying out a Texmex dinner for attendees, or a nonprofit providing a stack of pizzas for volunteers who come every Friday to stuff sexual health packets, good organizers ensure that the activists sticking their necks out are going into an action with a full belly and a clear mind.

There is a saying in activist circles that “We Keep Us Safe,” but building the long-term sustainable communities needed to dismantle fascism and authoritarianism requires more than that — we have to provide for each other. We need to ensure that the people committed to this fight have their basic needs covered.

And it starts with food.

I promise you that community will naturally emerge from the distribution of food because food is something we innately value. It's a need that goes deep. From holiday dinners to the candy we distribute around Halloween, many of our most intimate rituals, even unofficial ones such as a weekly family dinner or a “friend hang,” are around food. It is the building block for every cultural and organizational tradition that we have.

And so when you assist with the making, preparing, or distribution of that food, you place yourself in the center of such rituals as well as the emerging communities built on top of them.

It's important work, and now more than ever, it is vital that we disconnect food distribution from capitalism and feed as many people as possible.

A hungry conclusion

There are a lot of groups that feed people. A group I want to recommend is Food Not Bombs, which is easy to join (or start a chapter for if there isn’t one near you).

However, I want to stress that as long as the group is spending time actually feeding people and not just talking or preaching about it (and isn’t run by fascists), then it doesn’t matter who you work with. The group could be a church, a nonprofit, a grassroots campaign, or even an informal potluck that you start with your friends. Just feed people.

The fruits that grow out of these efforts are what will ultimately topple fascism, if we give them enough time.