In the wake of the Trump administration, tensions that were lying below the surface bubbled up and revealed themselves in plain view. The incarceration of Native protestors at Standing Rock, Nazis brandishing tiki-torches as they chanted anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Charlottesville, and the continued denigration and brutal subjugation of black lives under a white supremacist political order (as most widely publicized through the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020) were only a handful of events that laid bare the increasing discontent and division within American society that has been slowly growing for decades. Here at the end of 2023, it is all too easy to let many of the injustices that defined our society during Trump’s first term fade into our collective memory. 

       Facing the rising tide of fascism in the United States, the fledgling Left often finds itself disorganized, fragmented, and riddled with internal conflicts over petty differences. If we on the Left are to have any viable future, we need to have a unified understanding and strategy to collectively combat the growing wave of fascism in our midst. In her 2019 book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, Natasha Lennard (journalist, columnist at The Intercept, and teacher of Critical Journalism at the New School for Social Research) offers several reflections -- both personal and philosophical -- on the state of contemporary political discourses around protest and anti-fascism. 

Overview: 

       In this collection of essays, Lennard recounts her experiences as both a journalist and an activist as she reflects on the pressing issues of the past several years. Whether she is analyzing the distinctions made between “good” and “bad” protestors in the media, contemplating the ethics of punching Nazis such as Richard Spencer (spoiler: it is an unequivocal good), or musing about the collectivist political implications of the ghost that haunted her childhood bathroom, Lennard combines anarchist political theory with her own life experiences to illuminate our contemporary political moment. In these reflections, she offers up a few ways of identifying, examining, and enacting non-fascism. 

       From a stridently anarcho-leftist perspective, Lennard focuses on the capitalist structures that invariably shape and limit our imaginations, most notably in the binary of left vs. right positionality that overdetermines our thinking and often puts us on the side of the oppressor. This is evidenced by the construction of “good protestors” and “bad protestors,” which erases the background of violence that is committed by the state while also framing any direct action by protestors as inherently violent. This is especially salient in light of the Antifa and BLM protests that erupted during the past several years as a response to the murder of Black Americans by the police. 

       Other essays in this collection address other social movements -- such as the protests at Standing Rock, direct actions agai.  st fascism, state suppression of protests through surveillance and police violence, etc. -- and their legal and philosophical repercussions. For example, in her chapter “Being Nurmerous,” Lennard utilizes the surveillance of Occupy protestors and the unjust treatment of Edward Snowden to critique the techno-utopic, capitalist values of Silicon Valley. Showing how simple solutions to the crisis will not suffice to solve it, she writes:

The ‘apparatus’ cannot simply be isolated in the device or the interface - say, the smartphone or the website - because apparatuses are shaped by, and shape, the subjects that use them. Destroying the apparatus would entail destroying, in some ways, the subjects who create and are in turn created by it. There’s no denying that the apparatuses by which we have become surveillable subjects are also systems through which we have become our current selves, tout court, through social media and trackable online communication - working, dating, shopping, networking, archived, ephemeral and legible selves, and (crucially) communities. A mass Luddite movement to smash all smartphones, laptops, GPS devices, and so on would ignore the fact that it is no mere accident of history that millions of us have chosen, albeit via an overdetermined ‘choice,’ to live with and through these devices. (116)

The democratizing and decentralizing force promised in the early days of the Internet ended up as a double-edged sword: while access to information expanded in an unprecedented way, the power over these platforms and networks was consolidated into the hands of the few. 

       While many of the essays focus on events from the news headlines, some of them are more personal reflections on Lennard’s childhood and personal experiences. Yet, this does not mean that they still do not hold political salience. For example, the ghost that haunted her childhood bathroom becomes a springboard for philosophical meditations on truth, death, subjectivity, the afterlife, and atheism. Likewise, she turns her experiences with an awful ex-boyfriend into a scathing critique of the idea of sex as a politically radical and emancipatory act. Finally, her last chapter offers a poignant and deeply intimate reflection on her suicide attempts, and whether we can confidently say that it is never the right choice for the person who succeeds in completing it. The throughline that connects all of these essays, however, is the need to effectively organize a Left that is non-fascist in every aspect of life. 

Commendations:

For those who have never read Lennard’s work, Being Numerous is a fantastic introduction to it, as it combines both her journalistic writing with more personal reflections. While most of the essays have been printed in other places, it is still useful to have them all together in this short collection. Each chapter is relatively brief, and even though there is a lot packed within these 130 pages, it is still a quick read. Even if you disagree with her perspective, this alone makes it a compelling read.

       I also deeply appreciate her critique of the liberal aversion to violence, in which they mislocate violence, highlighting any direct action against the state as inherently immoral while ignoring the violence of the state. She recognizes that fascism never truly went away, but rather ebbs and flows in response to liberal capitalism. We will need more than logic and reason to defeat it, as she writes, “If desire for fascism is not something that happens out of reason, then we cannot break it with reason. So our interventions must instead make the entertainment and maintenance of fascist living intolerable” (16). Since violence defines the background of our lives, then, according to Lennard, antifascist violence serves as “a counterviolence, not an instigation of violence onto a terrain of preexisting peace” (22). Her emphasis on the fetishist disavowal of libidinal enjoyment as a primary driver of fascism is well-placed. As such, her perspective on the basics of antifascist thought and the role of violence against it is well worth contemplating and debating. 

       Throughout several of her essays, Lennard offers counterintuitive insights that serve as necessary interventions. For example, her essay on revolutionary sex is a striking corrective to the idea that nontraditional sexual relationships are inherently radical and emancipatory. While these relationships can certainly be radical when approached thoughtfully, they can also just as well possess a veneer of liberatory potential while being just as oppressive as any other toxic relationship. Poly, queer, and other nonheteronormative relationships require communication and trust, and they can be just as life-giving or life-draining as any other relationship. Speaking from her own experience, she turns the assumption of radical sex on its head, giving a much-needed corrective to how the overly-cliché notion of “the personal is political” has been misused and coopted by capitalist interests. 

       Additionally, her intervention in the discourse of “rights” is much needed, especially in the face of eroding trust in the institutions of the state in recent years, particularly the Supreme Court. Writing from an anarchist perspective that is suspicious toward any form of the state, Lennard writes, “An overreliance on the language of First Amendment rights treats the state--the Trumpian, corporate, white supremacist state--as an interlocutor, instead of as an enemy” (71-72).  While I am a bit more empathetic towards the concept of state-building than Lennard, I also see that her criticism of a rights-centered discourse in the face of an unjust state is completely valid and well worth considering. 

       When it comes to her more speculative writing, Lennard has some intriguing ideas as she connects the intimately personal with broad questions of life, death, and meaning. As someone who has advanced degrees in religion and philosophy, I found her meditations on ghosts, hauntology, and the role of hauntings and the supernatural among our “webs of belief” to be incredibly interesting. The questions she raises regarding the connection between haunting, the digital world, and the ambiguity of reality are fascinating, even if they are not fully fleshed out (no pun intended). 

       Finally, her final essay regarding her own suicide attempts struck a particular chord with me. Here, Lennard’s reliance on critical theory falls away, and we are left with only her and a sense of raw vulnerability. She writes with a simultaneously disarming and alarming candor about her experience as the limits of theory brush up against death itself. Discussing suicide often comes with an inherent sense of heaviness, a stigma that persists as we run up against the limits of language to describe the palpable lack within.  On this tension, she explains, “I find myself, the suicidal subject, irretrievably tangled in this dualism of self: both attempted killer and her would-be victim,” (126) while also noting that the question of intent continues to haunt her.  At the end of the day, she argues that we cannot say whether or not the suicidal subject made the correct choice for themselves if they succeeded. Even if one does not agree with her, this last chapter is undoubtedly powerful, especially as the coda to the book. 

Critique:

       On the other hand, the essays that comprise this collection are quite scattered in their focus, as the concept of non-fascism barely finds itself anywhere beyond the first chapter. Because they are so loosely related, they never come together to form a cohesive whole, which weakens the narrative thrust of the volume. Since she covers an immense amount of ground of history, critical theory, and personal anecdotes within such a short amount of time, it can sometimes feel like you are getting whiplash from all the places she takes you. The book can be quite dense at times and often assumes that the reader is familiar with critical theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, which is quite strange for a collection of short essays. There is so much information and theory packed into such a tight page count, which makes it a rather disjointed read. 

       This disjointedness is bolstered by a lack of organization within the essays. While the book’s subtitle leads the reader to believe that these essays are about “non-fascist life,” there is little about non-/anti-fascim beyond the first chapter. Most of the other chapters are only tangentially connected to the concept of antifascism, and while her more speculative writings were often the most interesting, they also felt disconnected from the rest of the book. Even as such, while highlighting the persistence of fascism in the post-war era and beyond, her concept of the “micro-fascisms” that permeate everyday life seemed to be a bit too squishy and obscure to be of much use. Of course, there are ways that our actions can support or undermine fascist ideology. Yet, Lennard’s analysis lends itself to a more inherently individualist solution, despite her attestation to collectivist decision-making. 

       Additionally, this volume is narrowly focused on events within the United States. While Lennard is based in the US and fascism is on the rise here, there did seem to be some missed connections between what’s going on here and the simultaneous rise of far-right groups in Western European nations such as France and Italy as well as other non-Western perspectives. Too often, the arguments in the book seem to be confined to the inner dialogues and discourses within a very niche circle of NYC-based anarchists. She all too quickly dismisses any notion of “the state” as an inherently evil and unnecessary institution, which I think limits dialogue across other contingents of the Left that recognizes the importance of the party and the necessity of the state to organize and distribute resources (a position I am more sympathetic toward). In its narrow focus, Lennard’s analysis remains disconnected from the wider struggle of Leftist organizing, especially in regions like the Midwest or South where (despite outdated and inaccurate stereotypes of these regions) important work is being done by organizers on the ground. 

       While the chapter on the fallacies of revolutionary sex is a much-needed critique, it is not as fully developed as it could have been. The main point of the chapter is that her terrible ex-boyfriend dogmatically believed that transgressive sexual relationships were inherently radical acts that one must participate in if one wants to be a revolutionary subject, which ended up justifying a litany of toxic behavior under the guise of radical praxis. While she uses her experience as a springboard to discuss the larger issue of sex and radical politics, it never seems to get too far off of the ground. Rather, it comes off more as a piece written to vent about her terrible ex, and often lumps polysexual/nonmonogamous relationships with LGBTQIA+ relationships, which, while not mutually exclusive, are not identical. There is much work that has been written about the ambiguity of sex, desire, sex work, and radical politics, and Lennard’s essay, while insightful in its dismantling of faux-radicals, falls a bit short. 

Conclusion:

Overall, Being Numerous is an insightful, if rather uneven collection of essays from an anarchist perspective. While the book is a bit disorganized and short on prescriptive actions, it is still a valuable insight into how a particular branch of anarchist thought has responded to events following the 2011 Occupy Movement. Of course, those on the more statist Left will probably find her total aversion to state-building to be inadequate in the face of rising fascism, but they will also find her interventions in the realms of big-tech surveillance, the criminalization of protesters, and the limits of rights-based discourse to be salient. Her critique of the standard liberal responses to far-right provocations will find a sympathetic audience in progressive-minded readers, and her speculative writing will move and challenge them to reconsider more fundamental questions of existence. Fighting fascism in every aspect of our lives should of course be of the utmost importance. As such, while it may not be the first book to reach for when reading about antifascist action, Lennard’s work serves as a provocative and unique window into the philosophical underpinnings of living a non-fascist life.