Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

by Mark Bray

Especially in times of crisis, Americans actually sympathize with restrictions of speech. This was evident in the aftermath of September 11, when half the country favored “press restraint” on covering the Abu Ghraib torture. Or in the fact that journalists are often arrested or harassed by police at protests, such as Occupy Wall Street and #NoDAPL, or that Trump’s White House restricts access to oppositional reporters. This is why the United States only ranked #43 on the World Press Freedom rankings in 2017.

free speech absolutism, like many kinds of rights absolutism, is impossible in a society of overlapping interests.

FBI used illegal covert methods to violently shut down social movements in what was known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). The corpses of murdered Black Panthers show how the government takes only a somewhat neutral stance toward free speech when it does not feel endangered itself.

Moreover, if we take free speech not merely in terms of its legal status as “enshrined” in the First Amendment but as a broader human value, we must recognize the complete rightlessness of the Guantanamo detainees, the de jure restrictions on the free speech of the country’s millions of prisoners, and the restricted voting rights of many formerly incarcerated. All this and not to mention the de facto restrictions on the speech of the country’s millions of undocumented immigrants, most of whom are too fearful of deportation to express themselves, and the degree to which colossal disasters, like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, have infringed upon the right to free speech and all the other rights of those who were killed.

All non-incarcerated citizens may have an equal right to literally speak, but the ability to make that speech heard and make it matter is highly stratified.

The market concept is lauded for its ability to promote beneficial outcomes. When applied to the question of fascism we must ask: Can we trust that the “marketplace” of ideas will not elevate fascism to the forefront of the public sphere?

antiauthoritarians seek to abolish prisons, states, and the very notion of citizenship—thereby eliminating this black hole of rightlessness. They also aim to construct a classless, post-capitalist society that would eradicate significant discrepancies in our ability to make our speech meaningful, and in the amount of time that we have to do so. By not devoting resources to prisons, police, and the military, such a post-capitalist society would be able to put far more into supporting education, the arts, and collective expression and inquiry.

Pundits attack antifa for being anti–free speech. Yet, even if you agree that shutting down fascist organizing constitutes an infringement upon the free speech of fascists, it is still patently obvious that anti-fascists advocate for far more free speech in society than liberals, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

ARA cofounder and Twin Cities GDC organizer Kieran explained that he would take a very different approach toward a far-right coworker if he were espousing his views as an individual than he would if he were attempting to organize.

In its 2006 “No Platform for Fascists” statement, the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement agreed with the distinction between organizing and individual expression, but argued that “as anarchists, we believe that there should be a right to free speech…[this right], however [is] not inalienable and there are very limited occasions on which [it] should be curbed.”

In early 2017, some Greek mayors even refused to welcome Golden Dawn MPs to their town or allow them to give public speeches. Militant anti-fascists oppose harnessing state power to suppress fascism because of their anti-state politics and their belief that any such measures would more often be turned against the Left. Yet, Sotiriou explained how the actions of these mayors demonstrated that the “antifascist movement has succeeded in passing this idea that there is no free speech for the neo-Nazis.”

While it is essential to distinguish between the hateful comments of isolated individuals and the organizing initiatives of fascists, organizing constitutes speech—often literally. Not all speech is organizing, and therefore anti-fascists do not organize against speech per se, but much organizing is speech.

When understood as a value rather than a law, it is clear that anti-fascism opposes this principle in its absolutist form (i.e., that all abridgements of speech are wrong). Instead, many anti-fascists make the illiberal argument: “no free speech for fascists.” From their perspective, the safety and well-being of marginalized populations is the priority.

the vast majority of people who oppose limiting speech on political grounds are not free speech absolutists. They all have their exceptions to the rule, whether obscenity, incitement to violence, copyright infringement, press censorship during wartime, or restrictions for the incarcerated. If we rephrase the terms of the debate by taking these exceptions into account, we can see that many liberals support limiting the speech of working-class teens busted for drugs, but not limiting the speech of Nazis.

If we don’t stop them when they are small, do we stop them when they are medium-sized? If not when they are medium-sized, then when they are large? When they’re in government? Do we need to wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings before we defend ourselves?

DOESN’T “NO PLATFORMING” FASCISTS ERODE FREE SPEECH IN A WAY THAT HURTS THE LEFT MORE THAN THE RIGHT? If taken in a legalistic direction toward promoting bans of government-disapproved speech then it certainly does. For example, the British Public Order act was used against the National Front, but also against the miners’ strike of 1984–1985.390

That is why German antifa seek to shut down fascist organizing through direct action rather than appealing to the state.

If your main objection to Nazism is its suppression of the meetings of the opposition, then that says more about your politics than about those you are critiquing. Anti-fascists don’t oppose fascism because it is illiberal in the abstract, but because it promotes white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, and genocide.

institutional commitments to providing resources and support for LGBTQ students, or the establishment of African cultural houses, or the creation of scholarships for undocumented students, are entirely hollow if the very same institutions also provide space for individuals and groups that not only deny the humanity of those populations, but are actively organizing movements to physically deprive them of their existence. How can a university publicize the mental health resources it offers for trans students and then allow Milo Yiannopoulos to publicly incite hatred against a transgender student?

those of us who have spent years on campuses across the country know how liberal multiculturalism has been institutionalized and, perhaps more importantly, monetized.

Administrators don’t get to say they care about the marginalized when schmoozing with donors, while they’re also supporting the right of bigots to preach about the biological inferiority of those same people.

Anti-fascists conduct research on the Far Right online, in person, and sometimes through infiltration; they dox them, push cultural milieux to disown them, pressure bosses to fire them, and demand that venues cancel their shows, conferences, and meetings; they organize educational events, reading groups, trainings, athletic tournaments, and fund-raisers; they write articles, leaflets, and newspapers, drop banners, and make videos; they support refugees and immigrants, defend reproductive rights, and stand up against police brutality. But it is also true that some of them punch Nazis in the face and don’t apologize for it.

There are three main arguments that anti-fascists use to justify their occasional violence. First, as explained in Chapter 4, anti-fascists make a historical argument based on the accurate observation that “rational debate” and the institutions of government have failed to consistently halt the rise of fascism. Given that fact, they argue that the only hope to prevent a sequel is to physically prevent any potential fascist advance. Second, they point to the many successful examples of militant anti-fascism shutting down or severely hampering far-right organizing since the end of World War II. Third, fascist violence often necessitates self-defense—although anti-fascists challenge conventional interpretations of self-defense

You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.398

If so many people glorify fighting Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s, why do they disparage confronting them today?

From Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan and Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds to Indiana Jones, nothing seems to delight American moviegoers more than killing Nazis.

But would those same moviegoers consider it just as heroic to fight Nazis before the outbreak of war, while Hitler’s regime was building camps and ghettos? Or before Hitler even took power in 1933?

How would Americans respond to a cinematic depiction of communist and social democratic organizations, such as the Red Front Fighters’ League, the Iron Front for Resistance Against Fascism, and Antifaschistische Aktion when they fought the Nazi Sturmabteilung in the 1920s and ’30s?

So why then are so many Americans allergic to not only the prospect of physically confronting fascists and white supremacists, but even nonviolently disrupting their speeches in favor of a Fourth Reich?

many people ascribe to a kind of “liberal antifascism,” whether they know it or not. By “liberal anti-fascism” I mean a faith in the inherent power of the public sphere to filter out fascist ideas, and in the institutions of government to forestall the advancement of fascist politics. If these factors were sufficient to protect everyone from fascist violence then why would anyone bother confronting Nazis?

Certainly, fascists always play the victim when they are shut down. Yet, they also play the victim when they are not. Fascism was built on fear—fear of Jews, communists, immigrants, Freemasons, homosexuals, “national decadence,” aesthetic modernism, “white genocide,” and so on. No matter how the Left treats fascists, they will always present themselves as aggrieved victims.

In the course of my interviews and research, I found a litany of cases where combinations of physical confrontations, doxxing, infiltration, and other anti-fascist tactics have succeeded in shutting down or severely hampering local and national fascist organizing.

In the 1940s, the British 43 Group succeeded in shutting down Mosley’s Union Movement. The massive Anti-Nazi League played a huge role in derailing the National Front in the U.K. in the late seventies and early eighties. Anti-fascist punks and skins across North America and Europe recounted how they overwhelmingly pushed Nazi skins out of their scene. Literally thousands of white-power shows have been canceled. Most of those that have occurred have been carried out clandestinely.

the suggestion that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and other examples of armed resistance to the Nazis were “abject failure[s]” is insulting. These moments gave an entire people pride in a context where they faced extermination.

The claim is also demonstrably false—Yugoslav and Albanian partisans, for example, actually won.

even the most rudimentary study of the implementation of the “Final Solution” and the broader depopulation of Eastern Europe in the pursuit of lebensraum (living space) would show that no appeal to public decency could have interrupted the gears of the Nazi killing machine.

The victory of the Spanish Popular Front in 1936 galvanized the Right to such a degree that they triggered a civil war. Certainly no one would argue that such results invalidate leftist electoral aspirations. These examples demonstrate that the Far Right thrives off the fear it generates from both violent and nonviolent leftist advancement and the progress of broader social justice. The KKK has thrived during eras of black social advancement—the election of Obama in 2008 spurred white-power recruitment, and led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Chenoweth critiques the violence of the civil rights era for its “alienation of whites.” Yet, the Black Power Movement rightly understood that they could not construct their political program with white people in mind if their main goal was black autonomy. Sometimes self-determination needs to be prioritized over winning a popularity contest that is designed for you to lose.

in the United States, although revolutionary socialists and Democrats might all be considered part of “the Trump Resistance,” revolutionaries aim to achieve a post-capitalist society, while Democrats aim to achieve a post-Trump presidency. Such different goals dictate different strategies. It is as disingenuous to assess the Black Panthers based on their approval rating among white people as it is to assess Amnesty International based on its level of insurrectionary fervor.

When we choreograph our politics based on opinion polls, they inevitably mirror the society that we seek to transform.

Viehmann tried to conceptualize a way to connect the feminist, antiracist, and social-revolutionary Left in Germany. He was especially intrigued by the writings of Hazel V. Carby on the concept of “triple oppression”—popularized by the black communist Claudia Jones in the 1960s—which analyzed the experience of the black woman under capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Two years before his 1993 release, Viehmann published Three Into One: The Triple Oppression of Racism, Sexism, and Class, based on discussions with various comrades in prison that synthesized the black feminist concept of “triple oppression” with autonomous and antiauthoritarian politics.

Dolores also remembered—with a laugh—how whenever antifa women beat up Swedish Nazis, the Nazis would always lie and say it had been men. For Dolores, anti-fascist violence could be very “empowering when you’ve been raised to believe you’re not capable.”

Whether excluded from militancy or critiqued for taking part, women face a variety of gendered challenges when they take an active part in the anti-fascist movement. That is part of the reason why some German antifa have created feminist groups called “fantifa.”

Any movement that engages with violence must remain vigilant against the tendency for the violence to overtake political goals. This is what allegedly happened with some ARA groups toward the end of the 2000s,

An RCA member complained about an “overemphasis” on the black bloc by new anti-fascists without considering it in a larger strategic framework. “If all you have is a hammer,” she observed, “all your problems look like nails.”429

Despite common misconceptions, the black bloc is not an organization or a specific group. It is a tactic of anonymous, coordinated street militancy used predominantly, though not exclusively, by anarchists and other antiauthoritarians that originated in the 1980s among the German Autonomen.

black blocs have managed to gain some measure of public support when the rationale behind the formation of the bloc has been intelligible. Some of the most notable examples have come from the use of the black bloc in defense of squats, outrage at police brutality, and opposition to Nazis. Over recent decades, Turkish migrants in Germany or Syrian refugees in Greece have recognized that at times some of the only people standing between them and fascist violence happened to be wearing black.

The Pastel Bloc of masked-up street medics with anti-fascist shields wearing pastel colors in the Bay Area is a recent creative variation on this theme.

within the broader Left, militant anti-fascism “acts in same kind of space that sabotage exists in in the labor movement”—people may not acknowledge it publicly, but they can see its tangible benefits on the ground.

“Nazi violence was ever-present,” and she recalled antifa protecting one immigrant-rights demonstration from Nazis with knives and bottles. “Regardless of people’s personal thoughts on antifa strategy,” she said, “there was a general understanding that we needed that direct and more confrontational activism.”