In the face of fascism’s “death cult,” radical communicators must forge a powerful “narrative solidarity,” using shared grief and belonging to build bridges and win.
Ase! In West African traditions, ase means “and so it is.” It is “the power to make change happen,” the essential energy that animates everything.
Mabuhay! In Tagalog, mabuhay means “welcome.” It is also an observation of conditions, as in, “there is life.”
Even in the rubble of genocide, in the chokehold of authoritarianism and patriarchal violence, even on the brink of climate emergency and imperial wars, there is life—and life is change.
We are living through the largest global rightward shift since World War II. Italian communist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci describes a similar period as an interregnum—that dangerous time between stable governments when many things are possible, from mass loss to mass liberation, from authoritarianism to agency and action, from fascism to new forms of freedom. This period of collapse and rebirth is characteristic of late-stage capitalism, but the vector and velocity of change will be defined by our actions.
We will determine the direction.
In this special issue of The Forge you will hear from radical communicators, narrative workers, and the griots making meaning of this moment. They are reaching beyond narrative advocacy to advance narrative solidarity. This is the path to build the bigger “we.”
Observation of Conditions
Right now, neoreactionaries, neoconservatives, and oligarchs are consolidating to force a national decline and insurrect a corporate kingdom. In their hands, narrative power is manipulated until might makes right, until white means right, until war means peace, until, as Maurice Mitchell says, we think of government as the problem and not the prize.
They know that discrediting and criminalizing the movement for Palestinian sovereignty wedges the Left from the liberal. They know that using nationalism, including Black nationalism, can wedge Black American communities from immigrant communities. They know that decimating our nonprofit infrastructure, recalling our elected officials, detaining our neighbors, withholding food assistance and healthcare subsidies, and withholding resources from our tributaries in higher education depletes modern freedom movements. But we know it’s an interregnum, not full capture. There is room for our victory.
We are orators, griots, futurists
and we are also bricklayers
We refuse to surrender to policies and practices that shift conditions toward authoritarianism. We grow our ranks, expose dominant power, and engage people through vision and hope.
We build the infrastructure necessary to move narratives from marginal to mass line, which means contending with corporate and elite power in a digital age.
We are the meaning-makers, who promote agency, protagonism, and connection in a time of manufactured isolation and fear.
Victory will be the result of our narrative solidarity.
Solidarity emerges from collective struggle, collective power analysis, collective freedom dreams, and collective values as they are lived and experienced within movements for liberation and human rights. Solidarity is action, a constant state of becoming, a life force.
Narrative solidarity helps create the conditions necessary for solidarity in action. It invites people to contribute, to collectively grieve, celebrate, vision, identify, shape by making sense of shared conditions. It exposes common histories of oppression and resistance, and uncovers nuances and details of conditions faced by multiple communities. It binds us together.
We are solidarity’s architects.
Power to Make Change
Radical communicators breathe life into new ways of being, leading, and loving. We recognize polarization as a consequence of widening social and economic inequalities, only made worse by intensifying climate change. We understand these inequalities can only be addressed by building power to shift conditions toward equality and transformative democracy.
We understand that the Left’s narrative strategy gap is a capacity gap and the cultural gap is an organizing gap. Above all, we understand that there is no narrative strategy without organizing and and no winning movement without narrative.
We know that while they have focused on exploitation and destruction, they have no real solutions to the climate emergencies we will face. This is a place of narrative weakness for the MAGA right and an opportunity for the anti-fascist Left. We can build belonging and grow ecosystems of interdependence through our shared experience of loss and longing.
Our cultural strategies will be holistic, will re-capture higher education, federal institutions, public schools, and civil infrastructure, because we know that protecting civil society (even some pillars of bourgeois democracy) transforms our base from audiences to agents of change, invested with passion, guided by strategy, and grounded in solidarity.
They use smoke and mirrors to consolidate authoritarian power. But in our hands, meaning can be solid, honest material. In our hands, meaning is the mortar to build solidarity power and our can tools lay pathways of connection and to invite new changemakers into the fold.
This is life-giving work.
The communicators and strategists you’ll read in this special issue are advancing narrative solidarity to build the bigger “we.” They show us what it means to move beyond critique, to bridge from issue-specific narratives to interconnection. They invite connection from audiences and communities that might otherwise be left on opposite shores. They help us ask:
How can we build a bridge where there is currently a wedge? How can Black communities understand deportation in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act instead seeing immigration as a threat to ever-tenuous Black citizenship?
How can we engage more and more people to stand against fascism, to rise for freedom? What moves people to make home in organized liberation fights after the profound individualism of recent decades?
What infrastructure can actually absorb these hundreds of thousands of disaffected and disenfranchised people?
Here, the measurement of change is not the language people use to talk about a specific issue. The measurement of change is how much closer we get to mass engagement against fascism and racial capitalism.
As Makani Themba has said, our work right now is less about enacting persuasion and more about building protagonism within and among targeted communities and accomplices. Protagonism can remind people that even under fascism, we have agency. And agency, which is internal power, is a prerequisite for building greater community and solidarity power toward liberation.
Right now, there are millions of people waiting for an invitation.
An Invitation
We invite you to orient our communications toward connection, toward life. The MAGA moment is designed to traumatize our collective bodies. The onslaught of attacks on every sector is meant to put us in states of trauma. These traumatized states can disable our capacity to vision, to connect. When primed with narratives of destruction, social psychologists have shown that we are more likely to accept authoritarian control.
We invite you to resist MAGA narratives of division and death with narratives of multiplicity and life. This means orienting our interactions away from unprincipled critique, away from one-upping on the ladder of ultra-left purity, away from the abusive algorithmic rewards given to cruel anti-social cancellations. This means orienting our communications toward naming differences without dismissal, toward exposing common oppressions and common enemies and common vision and common ground. To do otherwise is to do MAGA’s work for them.
We are orators, griots, futurists
We are bricklayers
We build arches and bridges
with mortar of shared humanity and belonging
Theirs is a death cult. We believe in living.
They invest in mass loss. We radicalize at the site of loss.
They dismiss and disenfranchise our grief. We know collective grief is a powerful unifier; that grief is a narrative path to power, a common ground to rebuild sacred trust, a strategy of mutual interest and common benefit.
Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to rebuild a narrative strategy of solidarity out of our collective grief. No faction can go it alone, solidarity narratives are the ones that will help us win.
Wherever there is a wedge, we will build a bridge.
Our message: there is enough, there is room, we can win.
