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Title: Not Your Grandfather’s Antifascism
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: August 29, 2017
Language: en
Topics: Anti-fascism, Charlottesville
Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/29/not-your-grandfathers-antifascism-anti-fascism-has-arrived-heres-where-it-needs-to-go

CrimethInc.

Not Your Grandfather’s Antifascism

Following the clashes in Charlottesville and the massive anti-fascist

demonstrations afterwards in Durham, Boston, and the Bay Area, the

struggle against fascism has arrived in the consciousness of the general

public. Tens of thousands of people are realizing that the fight against

fascism didn’t end in 1945—that today, as increasingly authoritarian

governments collude with ascendant fascist movements, this battle is

more pressing than ever.

It’s worth taking a moment to review what anti-fascists have

accomplished since Trump was elected. Despite harassment and attacks

from fascists and law enforcement, what was initially a few hundred

people without financial resources or sponsors has grown into the

foundation for a massive social movement. On April 15, fascists rampaged

through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people

to use for recruiting purposes. On Sunday, August 27, the same fascists

attempted to hold another rally in Berkeley. In response to the murder

of Heather Heyer during a fascist rally in Charlottesville two weeks

prior, thousands of people converged to make the fascist demonstration

impossible.

Imagine if the “Unite the Right” rally had taken place without

resistance, and a thousand white supremacists had been able to march

around Charlottesville unopposed. In that scenario, emboldened fascists

could have presented themselves as a legitimate part of the political

spectrum, while preparing the way for more murders like the ones in

Charleston and Portland. In that case, the government with Trump at the

helm would be able to present itself as the only possible solution to

fascist violence, and the general public would be forced to seek

assistance from the very authorities that are already implementing most

of the white supremacist agenda. We should be grateful that long before

Charlottesville, forward-thinking anti-fascists were doing the thankless

work of monitoring fascists and mobilizing against them.

But now that the struggle against fascism has arrived on a massive

scale, it’s time to come to grips with the limitations the movement

faces today. Every victory generates new challenges. Let’s explore the

obstacles that the anti-fascist movement will have to overcome to

succeed in creating a world free of authoritarianism.

Corporate Media Back the Fascists

The Washington Post titled their coverage of Sunday’s demonstration

“Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in

Berkeley.” It is not surprising when Fox News publishes barefaced

propaganda describing the organizer of far-right demonstrations that

have included at least one fascist murderer as a “prayer activist,” but

it is more unsettling to see fascist talking points parroted by

supposedly liberal outlets.

The image at the top of the Washington Post article shows a right-wing

demonstrator apparently being shoved by an anti-fascist with a shield.

Yet several videos show the same far-right demonstrator pepper-spraying

anti-fascist demonstrators without provocation and then pepper-spraying

people at random immediately before the photo was taken. If you look

closely, the attacker is wearing a shirt that celebrates Chilean

military dictator Augusto Pinochet for murdering dissidents by dropping

them out of helicopters. If you look closer, you can see that the

anti-fascist in the picture has a stick, but is choosing not to use it,

instead simply using a shield to block the fascist with the pepper-spray

from carrying out further attacks. In fact, the Washington Post chose to

use a photo in which the assailant’s right hand is not visible, so

readers would not see the pepper spray he holds in it.

When the Washington Post portrays such fascists as “peaceful,”

suggesting that they are victims even as they attack people and glorify

mass murder, this gives them legitimacy, securing space for them to

recruit and to promote and organize further attacks. Why would liberal

media outlets do this?

Journalists often determine the substance of their story in advance, and

it appears that media outlets across the spectrum had determined in

advance to report the anti-fascist demonstration in Berkeley as an

expression of violent excess even before it happened. In the event, the

demonstration was largely peaceful; even the worst clashes were

considerably less violent than the fighting on April 15. Despite this,

corporate media outlets that had ignored April 15 altogether devoted

considerable space to a few isolated incidents in which anti-fascists

scuffled with fascists or other Trump supporters.

The intention was clearly to impose a limit on the amount of popular

legitimacy anti-fascists would be permitted to accrue after the events

in Charlottesville. Two weeks of positive coverage of anti-fascists,

during which various members of the clergy came forward to praise their

efforts, were deemed to be too much. Heather Heyer’s murder had taken

corporate media by surprise, interrupting their conventional narratives

and proving that the threat anti-fascists had supposedly been blowing

out of proportion was all too real. It took corporate editors two weeks

to regain control of the discourse. As soon as they did, they reimposed

their old stereotypes as if Heather had never been killed.

This should put an end to any illusions we might have had that corporate

media could side with anti-fascists. Outlets like the Washington Post

aspire to position themselves against both Trump and his adversaries in

the streets—to occupy what some call “the extreme center.” They are

gambling that the current polarization of society is temporary, that

they can be the beneficiaries of disillusionment with both sides.

Anti-fascists have to strategize about how to organize and legitimize

our efforts to the general public without the benefit of positive media

coverage. This is no easy task. At the minimum, it will demand our own

grassroots media, at the same time that this media is under systematic

assault from right-wing trolls.

This challenge is symptomatic of the larger phenomenon of polarization,

which is worth examining separately.

The Swinging Pendulum of Polarization

US society has been splintering and polarizing for years now, since the

recession of 2008 if not before. The movement against police and white

supremacy that burst onto the national stage in Ferguson in 2014 as

Black Lives Matter generated a far-right backlash, which inspired a

resurgence of anti-fascist organizing. In response, fascists gave angry

liberals and anti-fascists a central place in their strategy, seeking to

provoke them into reactive behavior that could be used to further

mobilize the right-wing base. Milo Yiannopoulos used this strategy until

it blew up in his face last February, when a black bloc of hundreds shut

down his event in Berkeley.

Various fascist and fascist-friendly organizers also used this approach,

baiting leftists and anti-fascists with a series of “free speech”

rallies in Berkeley, Portland, and elsewhere around the country that won

the nascent fascist movement notoriety and momentum. This movement

appeared fully formed for the first time in Charlottesville—but the

shockwaves of that debut drew many more people into the movement against

fascism, changing the balance of power once again. The “free speech”

rallies scheduled afterwards in Boston and the Bay Area were total

washouts for the fascists.

In each of these cases, when the pendulum of polarization swung to one

side, the opposing side was able to use the specter of that victory to

draw more sympathizers into action. With the media narrative coming out

about Berkeley, the pendulum has again swung away from anti-fascists to

benefit the right-wing reaction.

So long as this pattern persists, every anti-fascist victory will

produce an even greater threat from the far-right and the government. To

break out of the pattern, anti-fascists have to strike blows in ways

that don’t enable fascists to cash in on the resulting fear among

right-wingers, or else to find a way to draw in large swathes of the

population more rapidly than their competition on the right. We can

offer a few hypotheses about how to accomplish this.

The Myth of Symmetry

The allegation that fascists and anti-fascists are equally bad has been

advanced most famously by Donald Trump himself in his response to the

events in Charlottesville. He suggested that the problem was an

“egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides,”

refusing to say a word about the fascists who murdered Heather Heyer.

This should tell us something about those who describe fascists and

anti-fascists as symmetrical.

To equate those who fight for freedom and equality with those who want

an autocratic state to enforce hierarchies is to reserve all legitimacy

for the state alone—which is itself an autocratic position. It means

celebrating the legalism of passive spectators over the heroes who

fought the rise of dictatorships in Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile,

Greece, and a hundred other nations. It means congratulating those who

keep their hands clean while their neighbors are rounded up and

imprisoned, deported, or killed.

We have to become adept at spelling out the ethical differences between

fascism and anti-fascism, and all the justifications for forms of direct

action that can actually be effective in this struggle. We need allies

from many different walks of life who can help us make this case to the

public at large.

Unfortunately, we can’t count on everyone on the Left to behave

responsibly. In “How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right,’” the same Chris

Hedges who assisted the state in dividing and repressing the Occupy

movement reappears to perform the same service in relation to the

movements against fascism and the Trump administration.

The irony of a war journalist perennially accusing others of being

driven by a lust for adrenaline should not be lost on anyone. It is

worse still that Hedges, as a journalist, arrogates himself the right to

pass judgment on the events in Charlottesville from a distance rather

than deferring to people like Cornel West who were actually there

putting their bodies on the line. But the true irony here is that Hedges

purports to be warning against precisely the problem that he himself is

creating. “By brawling in the streets,” Hedges alleges, “antifa allows

the corporate state… to use the false argument of moral equivalency to

criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.” Actually, it is Hedges

who is equipping the state to do this, by attributing “the same lust for

violence” to anti-fascists that he believes motivates fascists. He could

just as easily use his soapbox to debunk this moral equivalency, but he

lacks the moral courage—he simply cannot resist performing the same kind

of “self-advertisement for moral purity” that he accuses others of.

In 2012, when the authorities needed a narrative with which to isolate

the ungovernable elements of the Occupy movement, Hedges provided that

narrative, and the FBI subsequently parroted it verbatim in their

efforts to justify a series of entrapment cases. Now Hedges is providing

Trump’s government exactly the same service, equipping them to declare

“antifa” a terrorist organization, as many on the far right have already

been demanding. Already, the mayor of Berkeley is calling for “antifa”

to be designated as a gang—imagine if everyone who opposes the rise of

fascism is classified as a gang member, or a terrorist!

Hedges needs to understand that it is not anti-fascists gaining ground

that brings about fascist attacks and government crackdowns. If

anti-fascists were not gaining power in the streets, fascists would

still be taking advantage of the despair and resentment of poor whites,

and the government would still be developing more means of

repression—there would simply be no social movement to protect us from

them. It is fundamentally paranoid, disempowering, and ahistorical to

understand these developments as the result of anti-fascist activity. On

the contrary, it is imperative that we build the capacity to act

effectively in the streets before the fascists outstrip us and the

government is able to centralize enough power to establish tyranny once

and for all.

All that said, we also need to avoid offering our enemies on the Left

and Right alike the opportunity to present us as a mirror image of our

fascist adversaries. Let’s explore some ways we can go about this.

Identity and Containment

On one hand, it has been extremely useful for people in the US to learn

from anti-fascist movements in other parts of the world. At the same

time, the wholesale uncritical introduction of European models has

created problems, chief of which is the containment of the struggle

against fascism within a discrete identity, “antifa.” It has been a

tremendous boon to the far right that they can describe anti-fascists

without having to spell out the entire word “fascist”—it helps them to

avoid the question of why anyone would oppose resisting fascism.

In German, abbreviations are common: national socialist becomes Nazi,

anti-fascist becomes antifa. But in English, especially to those not

familiar with the history of German anti-fascist struggles, the word

antifa can appear alien and off-putting. At its worst, the German antifa

movement has tended towards subcultural insularity; this is the last

thing we need in the US, locked in a massive struggle with fascists and

the government itself—a struggle we can only hope to win if ever-wider

segments of the population are drawn over to our side of the barricades.

Identity is fundamentally about distinguishing oneself from others.

Anti-fascism, however, is for everybody. We should be careful not to

insulate it within a particular demographic with a specific dress code

and lingo. This is paramount because the far right are scrambling to

depict antifa as a monolithic, hostile, alien organization. Our task is

not just to build a network of groups, but to create an anti-fascist

momentum that will spread contagiously throughout society at large,

along with the critiques and tactics necessary for this fight. Specific

antifa groups and the cultural cache of “antifa” itself can be useful in

that project, as can black bloc tactics, provided we evaluate them as

tools for achieving particular objectives rather than expressions of

identity or belonging.

The Tendency to Militarize

As the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists intensifies, we are

seeing more and more guns in the streets. Some people who were in

Charlottesville reported that it was good that there were guns on both

sides: it discouraged fascists from escalating physical conflicts past a

certain point. Others report that most of the anti-fascists openly

bearing arms were located some distance from the clashes. Some people

who were in Ferguson at the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement say

that without the threat of gunfire from the locals, the police would

never have permitted the demonstrations to happen. Others who

experienced the trauma of having their loved ones shot before them

counsel that the consequences of bringing guns into street conflict are

weightier than most people can imagine.

Participants in the Syrian revolution report that for the first several

months, the revolt created an open space of debate and possibility in

which many people of different walks of life participated. Later, after

the conflict escalated, power among the rebels accrued in the hands of

religious fundamentalists, as they were the only ones who were able to

consistently acquire military supplies—and from that point on, the

horizon of liberation and transformation was closed. Sometimes, such

escalation is inescapable, even if it closes the door to future

possibilities; in any case, it is better to prepare for it now than to

be suddenly caught flatfooted. But if our goal is to carry out a

revolution rather than to fight in a civil war, we should not hurry the

process of escalation—we should drag it out as long as we can. Most of

the social changes we want to see cannot be brought about by guns.

Likewise, we should not imagine that coercive force can solve

everything, nor permit fascists and state repression to put us so on

edge that we see enemies everywhere we look and begin to attack people

when it is not strategic. In the words of an elder anti-fascist veteran

from Germany, fascist violence aims to exterminate, while anti-fascist

violence aims to educate. We should not hurry to put fascist martyrs in

the ground next to Heather Heyer. We must never risk coming across as

bullies. It must always be clear that we are here to protect the public

at large, not to assert our own authority. When we are compelled to use

coercive force, we must make sure that the ways we do so don’t

centralize power or legitimacy within our own movement.

The Language of Terrorism

In the wake of Heather Heyer’s murder, signs appeared at vigils and

rallies reading “White Supremacy is Terrorism.” While it is

understandable that people wish to condemn her murder in the strongest

possible terms, it is dangerous to use the language of terrorism to do

so.

The framework of terrorism is constructed by the state to define who has

the right to employ violence and who doesn’t. When we denounce white

supremacists as terrorists, we mimic the verbiage of Senator Cory

Gardner, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Paul

Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House.

Terrorist is used to designate those who are beyond the state’s control

and cannot be brought into political alignment with the state. This

explains why Heather’s murderer has not been charged with terrorism,

while many anarchists who did not so much as scratch someone have

received terrorism charges over the past decade and a half.

Using the rhetoric of the state reinforces frameworks and narratives

that the authorities will ultimately use against us. This is dangerous

to our movements and constitutes a betrayal of comrades engaged in

struggles we’re often aligned with. Palestinians are labeled terrorists

to delegitimize their struggle against the Israeli state. Like the

Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, the YPG and YPJ in

Rojava have been labeled terrorists. The language and ideology of the

“war on terror” were carefully introduced into US political discourse in

order to prepare the ground for the catastrophic invasions and

occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The word terrorism comes to us from the Jacobin government’s brutal and

merciless rule in France in the 1790s—the term was invented to describe

their “reign of terror” during which thousands were executed. Even

though the word was coined for the Jacobins and they wore it proudly as

a badge, some historians today argue that the Jacobins weren’t

terrorists because they were a state entity with legitimate power. This

should give us a sense of the extent to which the discourse of terrorism

serves to give the state carte blanche while delegitimizing all who

stand against it.

There Is No Good Authoritarianism

Sunday’s far-right rally in Berkeley was promoted under the slogan “No

to Marxism in America.” As with the far-right “March against Sharia,”

there is no danger of the United States coming under a Marxist

government any time soon. Like all totalitarians, fascists desperately

need enemies even more oppressive than themselves to point to in order

to convince people to join their ranks. There is an ominous symmetry

between groups like ISIS and Western fascists, some of whom openly

fantasize about a “White Sharia.” This explains their obsession with

authoritarian Marxism.

In fact, the fiercest opposition to contemporary fascist organizing has

not come from authoritarian Marxists, but from anarchists who oppose

state power itself. This is inconvenient for many fascists in the US,

who still need to present themselves as enemies of “big government” in

order to appeal to US Libertarians and traditional conservatives.

If fascists are eager to paint all their domestic opponents with the

broad brush of Marxism, we should not hasten to assist them. Yes,

authoritarian Marxists have historically played a role in the fight

against fascism, but they have hardly played it honorably. They began by

betraying and undermining other social movements as early as 1871. If

Stalin hadn’t sabotaged anti-fascist participants in the Spanish Civil

War and other movements around Europe and then concluded a pact with

Hitler, the Second World War would have unfolded much differently, and

it might not have taken decades afterwards for grassroots liberation

movements to recover.

Both fascism and authoritarian Marxism are experiencing a small

resurgence today. Much of this is taking place among people who grew up

after the fall of the Berlin Wall, who are too young to have

grandparents who lived through the Second World War. For many in the

United States, totalitarianism is abstract, something to joke about on

the internet. Some people on the Left see the hammer and sickle the way

many right-wingers see the swastika: as a provocative meme rather than a

blood-drenched symbol of oppression. Yet Stalin, too, carried out ethnic

cleansing, as have many other authoritarian Marxist regimes.

One cannot consistently oppose fascism without opposing all forms of

authoritarian government. This is not to say that rank-and-file members

of authoritarian communist organizations can never be comrades in this

struggle. Many of them are sincere people with the best of

intentions—and clearly we need all the comrades we can get when we are

facing down Nazis with guns. The point is that anti-fascists should

oppose the leadership of authoritarian Marxist parties for many of the

same reasons that we oppose fascists and other authoritarians. If you

care about a member of an organization like the Bolshevik Party, you can

express that care by making sure that his organization never comes to

power—for if history is any guide, he will be the next up against the

wall after you.

We must make it clear to the general public that we do not intend to

impose a new dictatorship, but only to open and preserve spaces of

freedom. There is no statist solution for tyranny.

Martyrdom

Unfortunately, Heather Heyer is not the first person to be taken from us

by fascist violence, and she will not be the last. In addition to being

wary of the discourse of terrorism and the tendency to militarize our

struggles, we should be wary of the discourse of martyrdom and tendency

to celebrate death in battle. We need to find ways to remember people

above all for who they were, for what their lives gave to the world, not

for how they died or what their deaths meant to the struggle. We should

not begin to regard ourselves or each other as playing pieces to be

exchanged for strategic gains.

We live in a society in which aging and death are concealed from most of

us. If this struggle continues to intensify, more and more of us will be

forced to learn what it is like to spend hard weeks in the hospital, to

meet at funerals as well as outside jails and courtrooms. We should

approach this as another opportunity to come to know ourselves and each

other better, to recognize what is beautiful and worthwhile in life—the

things for which we are fighting in the first place. We should not

subordinate ourselves to the struggle, but recognize it as one of the

ways that life pours forth abundantly within us.

Cutting to the Roots

The vast majority of the anti-fascist struggle does not take place in

street confrontations. It takes place in how we raise our children; it

takes place in the hard conversations at workplaces and family dinners;

it takes place in the ways we relate to our neighbors, the ways we

understand togetherness and belonging. To triumph, we have to make it

possible for people of all genders and ethnicities and religions to work

together to survive the ordeals of capitalism; we have to create

movements that can offer everybody more than the fascists ever could.

Ultimately, a thoroughgoing anti-fascist movement should not focus on

targeting fascist groups that are so marginal that they stick out from

the rest of the political spectrum, but take on the infrastructure

through which any authoritarian program will be enacted. That is to say,

it should focus on the state itself. If we simply fight defensive

battles, the fascists will eventually gain the initiative. We should

take the experiences of fighting together that we can experience in

anti-fascist struggle and use those as points of departure to work

together to solve all of the problems that we have. This is the way to

take the offensive and move on to confronting the fundamental sources of

oppression.

Some believe that life will go back to normal soon enough, and fascism

and anti-fascism will once more be things of the past. But we fear that

we have yet to see how far these conflicts will go, and that we have to

invest ourselves in confronting them head on. The only way out is

through. Double or nothing.