Admittedly I should have written this seven years ago, when neoliberals were begging us not to lay a hand on neofascists, but politically I was too simplistic back then. Having done a great deal of studying over the years, I can finally articulate how I arrived at my conclusions.
Many generic anticommunists presuppose that neofascists choose their politics simply because they are uninformed or misinformed, hence one can reason with them. This is a fundamentally incorrect conclusion. Attempting to reason with neofascists is a waste of time, not because many neofascists have vile personalities, but more so because class has the largest influence on their politics, not miseducation. Most neofascists are either petty bourgeois or come from petty bourgeois families, so they align with neofascism because it serves their class interests.
That is, by far, the most important reason. From our perspective, neofascism has no benefits, but the appeal is easier to see for a small business’s owner (especially one who served in the military): it delays his descent into proletarianization. Assaulting organized labor, strengthening the military, reducing ‘foreign’ competition, protecting private property (e.g. stolen land), none of these help us, but they do help petty bourgeois men who cling desperately to their class, hence why they frequently align with neofascism. One would have to first convince somebody to give up his class before he give up his politics, which sounds about as worthwhile as convincing a billionaire to give up his excessive wealth.
This leads me to my next conclusion, an important one that surprisingly few of us ever realize: our antifascism is an outgrowth of our class struggle. Whether they realize it or not, neofascists only serve the big bourgeoisie (a class that they sometimes criticize but cannot meaningfully oppose) when they harm us, because many of us are involved in organized labor in our struggle against the big bourgeoisie.
Left communists who ridicule antifascist activism (or actually existing antifascism) may be correct when they say that we merely address the symptoms rather than the causes when we fight neofascism, but their prescriptivism misses the point. Whether I personally approve or not of actually existing antifascism is irrelevant, because it is a historical inevitability whose causes are largely outside of my control. Antifascist activists (antifa) focus on neofascism rather than capitalism more generally not because their priorities are misplaced, but because neofascism has frequently made itself a more direct and immediate threat, necessitating a direct and immediate response.
This is not to say that nobody has ever willingly supported fascism out of cluelessness. It is likely, for example, that many lower‐class Italians willingly supported fascism because they simply did not know any better, and more recently we are seeing more and more lower‐class Jews going from being casual Zionists to anticolonialists now that Zionism’s neocolony is going mask off. Nonetheless, those who have the most to gain from neofascism are the ones least likely to reconsider it, because their problem is a matter of class rather than knowledge. That is why arguing with neofascists is a waste of time.
