Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

by Mark Bray

“reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy.”

anti-fascism is an illiberal politics of social revolutionism applied to fighting the Far Right, not only literal fascists.

Liberal pundits fail to fully grasp the importance of movement infrastructure because their opinion-manufacturing profession ascribes supreme importance to the communication of ideas in abstraction.

and how.

Sometimes self-determination needs to be prioritized over winning a popularity contest that is designed for you to lose.

If radical political strategy were determined based on the quantitative public favorability of different tactics, then the most moderate methods would almost always win out because they are the hegemon. If Americans had been polled about the best way to launch a movement for economic justice in early 2011, almost no one, myself included, would have approved of the idea of organizing an encampment in a park in lower Manhattan. For politics to be both popular and revolutionary, organizers must “meet people where they’re at,” while simultaneously establishing a political/strategic/tactical paradigm that advances the struggle. When we choreograph our politics based on opinion polls, they inevitably mirror the society that we seek to transform.

While one should always be wary about painting large groups of people with a broad brush, it is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia, and many more hateful traits. There is certainly a significant difference between “because of” and “despite” in this context, and sensitivity to the difference should attune us to the importance of mass organizing, which can divert potential fascist-sympathizers away from the Far Right. It is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.

Any time someone takes action against transphobic, racist bigots—from calling them out, to boycotting their business, to shaming them for their oppressive beliefs, to ending a friendship unless someone shapes up—they are putting an anti-fascist outlook into practice that contributes to a broader everyday antifascism that pushes back the tide against the alt-right, Trump, and his loyal supporters.

Despite the popular perception that race is “natural” or “timeless,” the biological notion of race is a modern European invention. When race was invented, however, it was invented as “the child of racism, not the father,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, and “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”442 Whiteness has never existed independent of its location at the top of the racial hierarchy. Thus, as Joel Olson explained in The Abolition of White Democracy, “ ‘White’ or ‘Caucasian’ is not a neutral physical description of certain persons but a political project of securing and protecting privileges…”

“Frame anti-fascism in terms of working-class self-defense.” —KIERAN, MINNEAPOLIS