Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

by Mark Bray

Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot cautions us that “…the past does not exist independently from the present…The past—or more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.”

argues that militant anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and that has become especially menacing in recent years.

Paxton defines fascism as: …a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.9

the reduction of the term to a mere negation obscures an understanding of anti-fascism as a method of politics, a locus of individual and group self-identification, and a transnational movement that adapted preexisting socialist, anarchist, and communist currents to a sudden need to react to the fascist menace.

At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”11 After Auschwitz and Treblinka, anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything.

Depending on local contexts and politics, antifa can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.

Lately it feels like an ideology and an act of self defense.

For this reason, it is vital to understand anti-fascism as a solitary component of a larger legacy of resistance to white supremacy in all its forms.

Of all recent social struggles, anti-fascism faces perhaps the most difficult road toward establishing itself as an extension of over a century of struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. Anti-fascism is many things, but perhaps most fundamentally it is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.

We should be warier of those who are truly neutral toward fascism than those who honestly espouse their opposition to racism, genocide, and tyranny.

Traditional elites were willing to concede many economic demands to liberals over the following decade in exchange for their abandonment of the revolution.34

and by the early 1920s the revolutionary tide was ebbing. There are many reasons for the failure of the postwar revolutionary movement, but one not lost on contemporaries was the general predominance of the reformist wing of the socialist movement. This was clearest when, in Germany, Friedrich Ebert, the socialist leader of the new Weimar Republic, sent paramilitary Freikorps to put down the communist Spartacist uprising of January 1919. In the process, the Freikorps, composed primarily of battle-hardened World War I veterans, murdered communist luminaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Need to read more about Rosa Luxemburg.

The bitter and bloody conflicts that divided international socialism after the war would come to represent formidable hurdles to the achievement of anti-fascist unity over the following decades.

attempted to start a new movement that would fuse elements of his earlier socialism with his growing nationalism and authoritarianism to forge “national syndicalism,” a new ethos of corporatist class collaboration in the interest of the Italian nation. This led to the formation of Fascio di Combattimento (based on the classical Roman symbol of a bundle of sticks surrounding an axe known as fasces) in 1919, marking the official birth of Fascism.

in practice his Fascist Black Shirts brought the war home by militarily targeting leftists in the service of landowners and employers.

The Arditi del Popolo were ultimately unable to withstand the Fascist onslaught for several reasons, including the strong financial and material support the Fascists received from economic elites, the fact that much leftist infrastructure had already been smashed by the time the Arditi were formed, and the inability of the Left to cooperate for the destruction of their common enemy.

Inability of the left to unify and fight a common enemy seems to be a recurring issue.

Either way, the assassination attempts were used to eliminate all non-Fascist political parties and journals, thereby inaugurating Mussolini’s dictatorship.56

At this point, the socialists and communists were far more preoccupied with each other than they were with the paramilitary formation that would prove to be the most important of them all: the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troops, or SA) of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). When Hitler formed his new party out of the right-wing German Labor Party, he didn’t really bring any innovations to existing right-wing ideology.

modernized this ancient “Aryan” symbol by thickening it in keeping with new graphic trends in advertising.63 This is one example of how Hitler reinvented the ideas and symbols of the Right through imagery, oratory, and organization.

Hitler also reinvented right-wing politics through violence. The Nazi (an abbreviation for Nationalsozialistische) Storm Troops not only emulated Mussolini’s Black Shirts by wearing their distinctive brown shirts, they matched the brutality of their Italian counterparts.

While Hitler was planning a war against the Left, socialists and communists focused on combating each other.

Sounds like today with tRump.

The Soviet leader Zinoviev argued that “the leading sections of German social democracy are nothing but a fraction of German fascism with a “ ‘socialist’ phraseology.”70 In fact, a significant reason for the “social fascist” turn was Stalin’s need to fend off Zinoviev and Trotsky to his right in the ongoing struggle for power in the U.S.S.R.71 Moscow politics often influenced continental anti-fascist strategy more than Italian or German realities.

While the socialists and communists were at each other’s throats, Hitler’s NSDAP was growing.

Again, happening now.

Much of the KPD leadership advocated opposing Nazism through the mass strikes of organized labor, but the depression had weakened organized labor and the KPD had become the party of the unemployed.

Brings to mind the idea that extreme action must sometimes be met with extreme reaction.

the Nazis used the resources of their wealthy backers to essentially buy out local leftist taverns in Berlin and use them as bases of operation in the fall of 1931.

The popularity of the Iron Front prompted the KPD to form Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action) as a network of factory cells, neighborhood groups, apartment blocks, and other geographical associations. In the 1980s and ’90s, many anti-fascist groups would adopt the name of this German organization, though the Comité d’Action Anti-Fasciste had adopted a very similar name earlier in 1920s France.

Antifaschistische Aktion aimed “to provide a framework in which people from all walks of life could be brought together in loose coalition to fight economic, social, and legal repression, and above all a basis on which Social Democrats and Communists could join in self-defense against the Nazis.”85

The German socialists hoped that the presidential governments of the early 1930s would do the same, but ultimately the traditional right thought they could control Hitler by bringing him into government. The KPD had already considered the authoritarian administrations of the early 1930s to be fascist. In their eyes, Hitler was merely a variation on a theme and his party’s inability to follow through on its promises would lead to his prompt ouster.89

Sounds like variations on a theme.

Blackshirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) were ramping up their anti-Semitism with the support of the Daily Mail.

To turn the tide, Franco called upon the forces that Mussolini, like Hitler, had sent to Spain in violation of the neutrality agreement that France and Britain were still conscientiously observing.

Again, fascists take action and anti-fascists of the old guard do not.

Besides the military, Franco was supported by monarchists, industrialists, and large landowners, the Church, and the Falange—a small fascist party formed in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the former dictator. Over the course of the war, the membership of the blue-shirted Falange grew steadily from five thousand before the war to two million several years later.

Ultimately the illusory harmony of the Popular Front fractured under competing interpretations of revolution and anti-fascism.

When we speak about anti-fascism, we must not forget that, for many, survival was the physical embodiment of anti-fascism.

Tate concludes with the ominous admonition: “let no one say these things were never real.”127

Shortly after the physical destruction of fascist regimes, waves of historical amnesia amplified the prevalence of resistance to Hitler, Mussolini, and their allies, while muffling the truly widespread nature of collaboration. Punishing that collaboration and fomenting European democracy, whether liberal capitalist democracy in the West or “people’s” democracy in the East, was encapsulated in the process of “denazification.” In the Western occupation zones, a half-hearted process of prosecuting individuals based on questionnaires drew to a close in late 1946 with more than two million cases still open.131 Many former Nazis and fascists remained in office as the focus of the West shifted away from a brief “moment of antifascist unity” toward the hostility of the cold war moving into 1947.

Why? Was it too much work? Did we not want to admit who had collaborated?

Denazification was more thorough in the East than the West, but its excessively class-focused analysis of Nazism essentially let the “innocent” workers and peasants off the hook while shifting all of the blame to elites.

formation in March 1946 of the 43 Group: a militant anti-fascist organization composed mainly, though not entirely, of Jewish British veterans dedicated to shutting down fascism through direct action and pursuing legislation against racist incitement. Later, militant anti-fascists would reject the legislative route because of their revolutionary anti-state politics. But the 43 Group was avowedly ecumenical.

In 1950, the 43 Group disbanded, believing that their goal of stamping out Mosleyite fascism had been achieved, at least for the time being.

Opposition to decolonization and immigration would become the cornerstones of a far-right resurgence in the postwar period.

In 1968, the Tory politician Enoch Powell delivered his infamous “rivers of blood” speech on immigration. Days after the riots in the United States provoked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Powell warned white Britons against allowing “the black man [to] have the whip hand over the white man” by permitting massive immigration.148 Powell’s speech fueled a rising tide of anti-immigrant violence

Although today most people associate skinheads with racism, ironically the movement emerged when elements of British working-class “mods” encountered Jamaican music and culture in the late 1960s.

Punk culture was taken over by skinheads and apprpriated.

wave of anti-immigrant racism in the music industry, evident in Rod Stewart’s claim that “Enoch’s our man” and Eric Clapton’s appeal to “stop Britain becoming a black colony,”

Le Pen forged the identity of his party around the “ethno-cultural racism” of the nouvelle droite (new right) that opposed immigration in the name of “French national identity.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen, as the father of the current French fascist politician.

Yet, as the next generation came of political consciousness in the 1960s, many young radicals were appalled at the shortcomings of denazification and the failure of their parents’ generation to fully come to terms with the Nazi legacy.

Nazi violence exploded in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the total collapse of the Soviet bloc, fascists in the region attempted to capitalize on anticommunist sentiment.

After the fall of the wall, broader German anti-fascist coordination became possible.

Twenty-five fantifa groups participated in more than a dozen national meetings in the nineties. Women’s demonstrations, women’s blocs at larger demonstrations, and women’s congresses, became common in the movement.189

British Anti-Fascist Action (AFA),

After the formation of AFA, Red Action took a leading role in organizing against the Nazi record label Blood and Honour (B&H), which was formed in 1987 by Ian Stuart, the frontman for the most infamous Nazi punk band of the era, Skrewdriver.

Still, the increasing portability of the militant antifa model was perhaps far more important than the longevity of specific organizations.

This may be the most important factor of Antifa.

Although the Left parties simply encouraged people to stay inside that day, this antiracist coalition mobilized a major street presence that intimidated the Nazis into canceling. In

This is the power of Antifa now.