Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

by Mark Bray

Regardless of the content of their analysis, however, many socialist and communist politicians did not lead as if the very existence of their movements hung in the balance. The Italian socialists signed the Pact of Pacification with Mussolini in 1921, and neither they nor the communists thought that Mussolini’s rise to power represented anything more than the latest rightward swing in the age-old rhythmic pendulum of bourgeois parliamentary politics. In that way, they were not entirely dissimilar to the majority of Spanish socialists who collaborated with Primo de Rivera’s somewhat fascistic military government in the 1920s. In Germany, the communists believed that fascism had already arrived when the “presidential governments” of the early 1930s started to rule by decree. Yet, neither the allegedly fascist “presidential governments” nor the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler convinced party leadership that they faced an existential threat. For the KPD leadership, fascism did not call for resistance by any means necessary, but patience. Their slogan was “First Hitler, then us.” At the turn of the century, leftists had reason to anticipate that eras of repression would come and go. Fascism changed the rules of the game.