What I Am Reading: "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook" by Mark Bray

Antifa has obviously been in the news a lot, with the President "declaring it a terrorist group" as the culmination of a few years of right-wing fear-mongering about how they are an imminent threat to rural and suburban white people. It is a fringe group that gets a lot of attention; an apolitical friend even sent me a link about how they “run” a totalitarian state in the Seattle Capitol Hill Organized Protest. There are a thousand links I could put up of right-wing hysteria over Antifa, but I’ll leave the reader to find them on their own. I came to this book specifically from a recent twitter thread by journalist Talia Lavin, who is publishing a book about infiltrating white supremacist groups.

Mark Bray, a professor at Dartmouth at the time of writing (now at Rutgers apparently) wrote a book that is both a history and an apologist tract. Antifa is a loosely-organized, grassroots movement of small units intended to confront and defeat fascism through direct action, including violent confrontation. Since there are many Antifa groups and no hierarchy, there are many different opinions on how and why this fight should be waged. Nevertheless, the history of these groups is one of collaboration, direct inspiration, and information-sharing, so some common tactics and ideology have emerged over time.

Part of the reason that Bray wrote this book is to legitimize the current Antifa organizations and movements. He argues that successful social and political causes, such as the mobilization against fascism of the 1930s and '40s, become decontextualized and sanitized as they gain establishment legitimacy, and thus are not viewed as part of a continuity from when they were small, radical, and faced establishment pressure. He hopes to show the connection of Antifa to its roots. He states in his introduction that the book focuses on where he has the most experience, Europe and the U.S.; he apologizes for the lack of focus elsewhere, but says it was most important to get the book out at the time it was published, in early 2017.

There are two history segments: the interwar history of anti-fascist organizing against the original rise of fascism, and the history of anti-fascist organizing since World War 2. In both cases I am going to truncate this history: in the first case, because there is only so much I can say about the Spanish Civil War before it gets repetitive, and in the second case, because the history of more recent Antifa involves shout-outs to and brief summaries of many, many small groups, and I think it's better to go with broad takeaways rather than get bogged down.

There were precursors to battles against fascism in the street-fighting of the Dreyfus years in France, and in African-American organizing against KKK violence in the Jim Crow era. Fascism itself first arose in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War, and the first explicitly anti-fascist group, Arditi de Popolo, mobilized soon thereafter, in 1921. The fascists had more money and support from industrial and agrarian establishments; while Arditi de Popolo was reliant on a fractious coalition of anarchists and Marxists who each had larger priorities, and didn't view fascism as a major threat. Obviously, fascism came to power in this case. Later, in the Weimar Republic, there were a few attempts at a broad left-wing organization to oppose fascism in the streets - the Iron Front, Antifaschiste Action (where Antifa gets its name, and its double-flag insignia) - but these, too, fell victim to leftist infighting (more on that later). In terms of iconography, this era also saw the creation of another main anti-fascist symbol, as Sergei Chakhotin, pursuing the same dynamic propaganda as the fascists had, created the drawing of three downward arrows through fascist graffiti, adopted as the symbol of the Iron Front.

After the fall of the Weimar Republic to the Nazis, the story picks up in Britain, where Jews organized against Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists, with many Jewish groups intending direct action in the face of tutting from the establishment. At this point, the Communists were also on board with anti-fascist coalitions, as they had switched from the Social Fascism doctrine, where they painted all of their opponents as various flavors of fascist, to the Popular Front, where they were willing to partner with anyone to oppose fascism. The famous British event in anti-fascist history was the Battle of Cable Street in October of 1936: where Moseley and company attempted a march through a large Jewish neighborhood in Whitechapel, and was met by a massive counter-demonstration of Jews, leftists of all stripes (though the Communists, almost too respectable now, had to be shamed into it), burly Irish dockworkers, and others. After a massive riot where the police made several attempts to clear the barricades and allow the fascists to march, the effort was aborted. The book lingers a while on this important victory, and returns to it a few times while discussing organizing theory. I even joked to a friend that I wouldn't have needed to read this book if someone would just send me a good longform about the Battle of Cable Street.

Finally, there is the Spanish Civil War, which of course was more than street-level organizing. This involved a broad anti-fascist coalition in the form of the International Brigades, though also co-opting of the "antifascismo" label when the Communists fought the Anarchists and other ideological enemies in Barcelona. The war did produce the famous anti-fascist slogan, "No pasarán!, or "they shall not pass!."

Then, the war came. Bray traces modern Antifa to the post-war period, after Europe was reorienting itself toward the Cold War and was often willing to let fascist bygones be bygones in the name of opposing Communism. In Britain, the 43 Group formed after the war, in response to Moseley's attempts at renewed organizing. Mostly made up of Jewish veterans, the 34 Group (named for its initial member-count) practiced both direct action in the form of disruption of fascist gatherings, and legislative pressure, which was eventually abandoned. They started fights in outdoor rallies and infiltrated indoor ones, and made use of a police policy that if the lectern was toppled, the fascists weren't allowed to right it. The group existed until 1950, when it disbanded, victorious against Moseley's efforts at a comeback. Through the 1950s, anti-fascists often opposed colonialist and imperialist causes, forming and reforming different groups as the threat of fascism (mostly in the form of Moseley) waxed and waned. In the late 1960s, anti-fascist organizing started to take the form of organizing against racism, the National Front, and Enoch Powell; organizations of people of color, often inspired by the Black Panther Party, won a big victory by preventing an NF march in Lewisham in 1977.

As the book comes to the late '70s, the stories increasingly come to concern the punk rock community, and battles between fascist and anti-fascist “Oi!” punks. Anti-fascists organized in Britain, France, and across Europe to make sure that punk shows were free of fascists, and were involved in grassroots anti-racist and working class causes, such as the defense of squatter's rights (a recurring topic). Throughout the '80s, punks took matters into their own hands as European states often failed to take action against fascist organizations. This is the part where the story comes to involve dozens of groups across Europe, some very short-lived. I suspect that the author felt obligated to give a shout-out to everything his interview subjects were involved in. I will mention some of the highlights, such as when the Germans started the "black bloc" method of hooded and black-clad marchers and motorcyclists blocking or disrupting fascist events while remaining anonymous; or collaboration between the British Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and the German Autonome Antifa (AA(M)) in the early '90s, which was gradually abandoned based on a different in perspective between the class-focused British and the middle class feminism and anti-imperialism of the Germans. The important point across this time, following the end of the Cold War, was that the groups may have been temporary and fractious, but the ideology and tactics of direct action and support for the victims of fascism was portable across groups.

Skimming over a bit of history, this brings us to the present day, as considerable Antifa mobilization has been in defense of immigrants and refugees, especially from Syria, against fascist groups. Antifa also came to the United States in the form of Anti-Racist Action in Minnesota initially; America has of course had a long history of mobilization and organization by oppressed people against oppression, but Bray is specific here in referring to the European concept of Antifa, a small cadre taking direct action. It takes different forms in different countries, from the comparative success in Scandinavia to the street fights between open fascists and anarchists in Greece. That brings us to the problem facing Antifa today: the evolving respectability of fascists. Nowadays, as anyone who reads about the Alt-Right knows, the far-right is increasingly feigning respectability and, these "pinstripe Nazis" are coming to be involved in mass politics. Antifa is still adapting to this challenge. Do they try to integrate into larger left groups and mass mobilization? Thoughts are mixed. Rounding out the discussion of modern anti-fascism is the Rojava revolution in Syria, as the Kurdistan Workers Party fights off the Turkish and Syrian states, as well as ISIS, while organizing around an autonomous anarchist ideology, similar to that espoused by many Antifa groups and activists. This has attracted some international volunteers the same way the Spanish Civil War did.

Bray presents five historical lessons important to Antifa:

  1. fascism has never come to power violently, always legally through cooperation with existing power structures;

  2. fascism isn't just a normal counter-revolutionary/reactionary ideology, it is its own specific right-wing ideology; opposition thus must be both analytically accurate in identifying their enemies and morally-encompassing not to get hung up on definitions when choosing who to oppose and;

  3. the left’s rank-and-file identify threats and collaborate across ideological divides better than their leaders do;

  4. fascism steals the left’s ideology, imagery, strategy, and culture in an effort to co-opt their appeal; and

  5. fascists don't need to be numerous, especially at the beginning; sometimes by the time they reach critical mass, it is too late to stop them.

This brings us to the apology section. Antifa has received criticism for its tactics of deplatforming of fascist speakers and sometimes-violent confrontation with them or their followers, especially on free-speech grounds. Bray has a few responses to these criticisms. He says that the "marketplace of ideas" that supposedly leads to meritocratic outcomes (and should thus easily dispense with fascism) is always skewed by money and power anyway, and that almost nobody, including critics of Antifa, is a free speech absolutist. Governments ban hate speech, tobacco advertising, and so on; Antifa just chooses to mobilize against fascist speech. Thus, Bray says, Antifa is no more opposed to free speech than the existing regime is. There is considerable debate on this subject within Antifa groups, as one would expect from bottom-up orgs. Are they working against free speech? If so, are they doing so in an inherently illiberal way, or not, since fascist governments restrict free speech in the long run? Bray also rejects a "slippery-slope" argument that restricting fascist efforts will inevitably expand to other repressions; he notes that successful Antifa organizing has led to the disbandment of Antifa organizations. The Germans zealously ban Nazis and Nazi symbols, and this has not spiraled into totalitarianism. Antifascism is a defensive reaction, based on specific historical circumstances. It does not exist in a vacuum. Bray covers this and a few other common criticisms.

Finally, there is some discussion of Antifa strategy, partially an extension of the section rebutting common criticism. As I have mentioned but not gone into great detail on, Antifa operations often block or attack fascist rallies, disrupt or prevent fascist meetings, and otherwise hinder common grassroots organizing tactics that fascist organizations try to put into place. Some argue that media coverage of a dramatic disruption, or of the deplatforming of a prominent right-wing speaker, just lends media coverage to that cause. Bray admits that this may be true the first time, but in the long run, media interest in such events fades if they become de rigueur; and eventually it would have been more beneficial for a fascist group to have had their rallies or other organizing events, rather than have them disrupted every time with a decreasing level of media attention. Antifa also engages in nonviolent action, often in the form of tracking and revealing (including doxxing) members of fascist organizations, including calling their parents on them, in one fun example. Bray also wades back into historical territory when discussing criticism based around the efficacy of violent vs. non-violent actions against the Nazis, noting that both methods had successes and failures. He had family members who were Holocaust victims in Poland, and rejects the claim that uprisings like that in the Warsaw Ghetto were futile, as they allowed victims to reclaim their humanity. It may be true that non-violent organizing worked against the Nazis in places like Denmark, but that is because the Nazis viewed the Danes as people. Bray finishes with modern Antifa and their efforts to integrate into larger, left-wing groups; and efforts to dial down the machismo and become more welcoming to people of all genders.

This book could be a little too granular in some instances, and there were a few occasions where it coasted a bit on broader left-wing theorizing (“is Antifa any worse than private prisons and the war on terror?”). However, I think it was a good (and seemingly unique) look at an important topic, and makes a good effort to contextualize modern Antifa, much-maligned, within the framework of the continuing struggle against Fascism going back to the very beginning. Organizing efforts go back at least to Jewish veterans of World War 2, who no doubt had their own memories of the struggle against fascism before the war; their successors spread the ideals and tactics through the punk scene and through the continent and world. Is this the best way to fight fascism? It’s a discussion worth having. If you had asked me a year or two ago, I’d have been firmly on the “these guys are not helping” side of the debate, but the book does raise some salient points.