Destroying Fascism Through Collective Care

Introduction

“You don’t argue with fascism, you destroy it.” Buenaventura Durruti’s declaration slices clean through liberal illusions of debate. Yet destruction alone is sterile if it doesn’t germinate care from its ashes. Every movement that has risen to confront fascism and capitalism has faced the dual imperative of wielding force while preserving legitimacy. Violence without compassion isolates; compassion without strength evaporates. The task is not simply to resist but to craft an ecology of struggle where arms protect, healing rebuilds, and both speak the same ethical language.

This tension defines the revolutionary moment. When fascism advances under the guise of order, communities lose faith in the moral right to defend themselves. Fear pacifies, debate delays, and propaganda reframes courage as extremism. Yet history teaches that waiting for permission means surrendering the future. From Spain’s anarchist columns to anticolonial guerrillas, successful resistance grew not from rage alone but from a shared moral fabric that made force legitimate.

The question for today’s militants is how to create that legitimacy while confronting a system whose cruelty cloaks itself in civility. This essay traces a strategy of collective care as revolutionary armor. It argues that armed resistance must operate inside transparent covenants, reciprocal labor, radical storytelling, and moral translation. Each act of force must carry its own opposite—a visible proof of love. Only through such synthesis can a movement destroy fascism without becoming its mirror.

From Destruction to Defense: Rethinking Revolutionary Violence

The moral terrain of force

Every generation of revolutionaries inherits the same dilemma: when to pick up arms, and how to ensure those arms serve the people rather than consume them. Fascism’s genius lies in forcing this decision prematurely, pushing movements toward desperate violence or paralyzing restraint. The antidote is deliberate design—embedding violence within a moral structure so transparent that even enemies can recognize its coherence.

Violence becomes ethical when it is clearly defensive, proportionate, and anchored in collective deliberation. The Spanish anarchist militias that Durruti championed were not mere combat units; they were communities in arms. Their legitimacy flowed from open assemblies that guided every operation. The bread oven and the barricade stood side by side, making it clear that liberation was a lifestyle, not an adrenaline event.

Contrast this with movements that collapse into opaque militarism. The Black Panthers’ breakfast programs shielded them from total demonization because they paired rifles with feeding children. When those social programs weakened under repression, the public narrative shifted, and the state’s counter-insurgency succeeded by painting self-defense as aggression. Violence bleeds moral power when its story loses coherence.

Violence as ritual, not spectacle

Revolutionary violence must be ritual, not entertainment. Ritual binds participants through meaning; spectacle drains meaning through performance. The distinction defines whether society perceives an uprising as justice or horror. Occupations, blockades, or targeted sabotage can all be forms of violence—but ritualized through ceremony, intention, and community validation, they become sacred acts of protection rather than chaos.

In this sense, preparation is liturgy. Fighters undergo ethical training as seriously as weapons training. Before any engagement, assemblies recite covenants that outline precisely what harm is being blocked and what values must remain inviolable. The battlefield becomes a moral classroom. In doing so, you replace the language of vengeance with the liturgy of guardianship.

Balancing risk and resonance

Violence always carries the risk of alienating potential allies. Yet complete pacification emboldens fascists who interpret kindness as weakness. The balance emerges through resonance: does the act expand the circle of empathy? If your action makes outsiders imagine themselves within your struggle, it resonates. If it causes retreat into fear, it fails strategically even if tactically successful.

Maintaining resonance requires immediate care after confrontation. When bullets fall silent, the movement must reappear the next morning cooking soup, mending walls, escorting neighbors through patrol lines. People judge not by theory but by aftermath. Care restores meaning to destruction, turning fear into trust. This transition point—from blast to bread—is where revolution either matures or withers.

Building the Covenant: Ethics as Strategy

The public covenant as moral infrastructure

Transparency transforms resistance into a public service. Establishing a visible covenant before rising against fascism grounds the movement’s legitimacy in communal consent. The covenant names the threat, the purpose, and the line that will never be crossed. Written in accessible language and ratified in open assemblies, it functions as both moral compass and propaganda shield. When spoken by grandmothers and schoolteachers, not just commanders, it disarms accusation.

Such covenants also reverse a core asymmetry: fascism hides its violence behind institutions, while revolutionaries must expose theirs to remain trusted. Publishing your ethical code demystifies intent and forces the state to reveal its hypocrisy. Every signature multiplies accountability, making abuses less likely and trust more abundant.

Simulated engagements and dissent stewards

Before confrontation, run what strategists call a pre-mortem simulation: walk through an operation step by step, naming who suffers if each step fails. Fighters, medics, elders, sceptics—all must speak. This exercise uncovers blind spots that adrenaline conceals. Document and revise the plan collectively, signaling that no single will dominates the cause.

To prevent internal authoritarian drift, appoint dissent stewards whose sole duty is to argue against proposed actions. Their safety must be sacred; a movement that protects its critics proves its maturity. Dissent acting openly within a revolutionary army inoculates against fanaticism and broadcasts that moral pluralism survives even under arms.

Reciprocity as revolutionary economics

For every weapon distributed, the movement should generate an equivalent measure of communal labour. Record it transparently: for every bullet fired, one hour of childcare, one meal served, one shelter repaired. Publish the list. The ratio manifests the principle that protection and reconstruction are twin currencies. This discipline keeps the militia embedded in daily life rather than drifting into abstraction.

When such reciprocal accounting appears on public boards, money loses its monopoly on value. The community sees that defense is not a separate sphere; it is another form of work. In historical terms, this mirrors the anarchist collectives of 1936 where militias harvested crops after battles. It proved that autonomy, not chaos, was their true aim.

Combining covenant and reciprocity

Covenant without reciprocity becomes sermon; reciprocity without covenant becomes chore. Together they create an ecology of legitimacy. Every operation references its moral charter and material ledger. Every fighter knows the cost of their bullet in hours of labor, and every civilian knows the line that cannot be crossed. This synthesis transforms militarism into collective governance.

The structural payoff is immense: external propaganda loses traction because your legitimacy is visible. People may fear violence, but they rarely fear integrity.

The Narrative Front: Storycraft and Perception Warfare

The story behind the shot

In an information age, every act of resistance competes in the attention marketplace. A battle poorly narrated becomes an invitation for repression. Hence, revolutionary storytelling is not decoration but defense. You must control both the visual and moral framing of each action before opponents weaponize it.

Assign dual-witness cells: one comrade documents the field, another gathers testimonies from civilians. Within a day, publish illustrated reports acknowledging mistakes and explaining reparations. Radical transparency steals the moral high ground from those who thrive on fear. When people see humility encoded in courage, they recognize humanity within rebellion.

The narrative must articulate not just what happened, but why ordinary morality demanded it. Avoid abstract ideological jargon; use the language of protection, bread, and dignity. People unite around felt needs, not theoretical purity.

Art as narrative armor

After every confrontation, let artists translate events into multiple mediums—murals, songs, performances. Art absorbs trauma, reframes fear, and preserves the revolution’s emotional memory. In Spain, painters documented the front lines; in Chile, protest songs carried memory through dictatorship. Today, digital art and community theater can preempt misinformation loops by telling stories at human scale before algorithms twist them.

Aesthetics is strategy. The fascist state fears beauty that tells the truth of suffering, because beauty humanizes what propaganda dehumanizes. Each artistic retelling becomes a recruitment poster for solidarity.

Grandmothers as interpreters

Movements falter when violence becomes a private dialect. Translation is essential. Clergy, teachers, and elders interpret actions for the wider public. Their role is not decoration but strategic mediation between militant and civilian worlds. When grandmothers bless a defense committee, the narrative becomes moral, not military.

These interpreters ensure that outsiders understand the purpose and limits of revolutionary force. They reintroduce empathy where fear would otherwise close hearts. Strategic empathy is more corrosive to fascism than bullets; it turns potential adversaries into witnesses.

Narrative half-life and moral renewal

Every violent act has a half-life: its meaning decays unless renewed through reflection and repair. Publish post-action reports openly, including casualties, moral lessons, and restitution. Silence breeds rumor; transparency breeds continuity. Over time, this rhythm of action and explanation weaves an unassailable story of self-defense.

When communities anticipate that truth will follow every shot, they stop fearing your secrecy and begin respecting your discipline. The narrative front then complements the armed front, fusing persuasion and deterrence into one coherent strategy.

Community Through Care: The Politics of Reconstruction

Care as strategic necessity

Fascism thrives on manufactured scarcity—of food, shelter, safety, and belonging. Destroying its power requires reconstructing abundance in visible, practical ways. Armed defense without reconstruction merely prolongs despair; reconstruction turns defense into creation. If your people eat because of you, they will fight beside you.

Organize service brigades that travel behind combat units: medics, teachers, food cooperatives, repair squads. Their work demonstrates that violence belongs to protection, not predation. The public sees a pattern: each act of destruction is answered by an act of renewal. This expectation is the seed of post-conflict governance.

Ritual decompression

Psychological safety is strategy, not luxury. Regular decompression circles prevent emotional corrosion and nihilism. Fighters, civilians, critics—all share space to recount events and digest trauma. Phones stay off; hierarchy dissolves temporarily. These circles extract wisdom from pain and signal that the movement values healing as much as heroism.

Over time, decompression becomes a cultural habit that replaces reactionary machismo with collective reflection. The practice distinguishes a people’s war from a gang war.

Bridging allies through service

Community service after armed conflict does more than repair damage; it manufactures allies. Refugees, neutral villagers, even former adversaries often cross into solidarity when they witness organized care. The Cuban literacy brigades or the Zapatista hospitals illustrate how clinics and classrooms become stronger fortresses than any trench.

Service, in this sense, is persuasion performed through compassion. It reveals that your struggle is not against humanity but for it. Allies emerge not from agreement with ideology but from gratitude for tangible help.

The dual task of destruction and reconstruction

Destroying fascism and capitalism is a twin operation: dismantling exploitative structures while erecting autonomous ones. Armed defense prevents annihilation, but cooperative building embodies the alternative society. When both tempos coexist—fight and heal—the line between wartime and peacetime dissolves into a continuous revolution of everyday life.

Ultimately, the proof of victory is not the enemy’s defeat but the birth of self-rule. The test of any movement is whether people can live freely under its care before the old order vanishes entirely.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To translate principle into action, movements must ritualize good strategy. These steps offer a framework for grounding armed resistance within collective care.

• Draft a community covenant. Define your ethical limits, objectives, and defensive nature in accessible language. Ratify it in open assemblies to embed legitimacy.
• Simulate failure before action. Use pre-mortem rehearsals with fighters, civilians, and medics to anticipate harm and redesign plans before tragedy strikes.
• Pair arms with care. For every combat unit, maintain an accompanying service team that repairs, feeds, and supports affected families within twenty-four hours of operations.
• Create a reciprocity ledger. Track community labor equal to military action. For each hour spent on defense, commit an hour to reconstruction. Publish the ledger publicly.
• Institutionalize dissent. Appoint rotating dissent stewards protected from retaliation to ensure continual ethical scrutiny and innovation.
• Own the narrative. Deploy witness teams to document and publish transparent reports of all operations, including restitution measures. Supplement with art that humanizes the struggle.
• Establish decompression rituals. Schedule mandatory post-conflict reflection circles that include non-combatant observers. Transform trauma into collective insight.
• Empower interpreters. Recruit moral authorities—elders, educators, spiritual figures—to translate your actions for the broader public, expanding empathy instead of fear.
• Integrate service and defense. Consider every logistical action—food distribution, medical aid, education—as part of the same revolutionary front as self-defense.

These practices cultivate a culture of care strong enough to absorb the shocks of warfare without losing its humanity.

Conclusion

The struggle against fascism is not a debate but a defense of life against its predator. Yet defense need not mimic domination. The weapon that matters most is moral coherence, the visible relationship between destruction and creation. Armed resistance becomes revolutionary only when it makes care inevitable, transparency habitual, and solidarity contagious.

Movements that master this balance rewrite the story of revolution itself. They prove that the gun and the garden can coexist, that liberation is not chaos but organized love under fire. In this synthesis lies a strategy powerful enough to defeat fascism without reproducing its soul.

The question remains for you: will your acts of defense widen the commons of trust or close it? The future of revolution depends on how convincingly you can turn destruction into care and care into sovereignty.