What is Antifa?

 

Insignia by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Gebhard and Max Keilson

 

     The president of the United States calls antifa “a sick, dangerous radical left disaster” (all caps in his screaming version) and “a major terrorist organization.”  If a political leader regards anti-fascists as the enemy, does that not look very like a confession?  Only two generations after the great World War against German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese imperialism, we see leaders openly espousing authoritarianism.  After two and a half centuries of at least nominal allegiance to democracy, we find we have elected an authoritarian who wishes to discard every traditional American ideal. 

     In fact antifa today is scarcely an organization at all.  Insofar as an antifa ideology exists, it prescribes a decentralized network of autonomous small groups, like the “affinity groups” of the ‘eighties.  Recalling the Red Scares following each of the two World Wars, the label is today merely an excuse for curtailing free speech and protest.  In spite of the fact that the vast majority of political violence comes from the extreme right, rightist propaganda seeks to convince people that it is the opponents of dictatorship who are a threat.  The oligarchs hope by the creation of a false danger to distract the people from the fact that they are daily robbed by their rapacious rulers for whom even billions are not enough.

     Antifa is not entirely a reactionary fantasy, however, and bears a largely honorable lineage in progressive history.  Anti-fascism emerged with the advent of fascism itself, in 1920s Italy with the Arditi del Popolo (Daring Ones of the People), a broad leftist alliance embracing anarchists, communists, socialists, trade union leaders, and republicans which reached a membership of twenty thousand.  Their name was linked to the Arditi, the Italian nationalist shock troops that occupied Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) following World War I and proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro, led by Gabriele D'Annunzio and syndicalist Alceste De Ambris.  This self-proclaimed state declared in the Carta del Carnaro that men and women should be entirely equal, that the state should favor no religion, that freedom of speech, association, and the press are guaranteed and, most strikingly, that “no property can be the reserve of one person as if a part of that person.”  Religious beliefs listed in the Carta were in fact wholly secular, recommending appreciation for the beauty of life, absolute freedom, and the value of all labor.

     This program attracted attention from many foreign artists and revolutionaries for a time.  The short-lived government was the first to recognize the Soviet Union and Lenin sent D’Annunzio a box of caviar with praise for him as the only other authentic revolutionary of Europe.  The fundamental form of government was direct democracy with workers’ councils making decisions. 

     Yet fascism and anti-fascism are entangled in this scene.  A few months before the declaration of Carnaro, De Ambris, long a socialist and a labor union militant on the left fringe of the Italian Socialist Party, had, with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, written "Il manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento" (the “Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat”).  Marinetti, of course, became a committed fascist, loyal to Mussolini, while De Ambris associated instead with the Arditi.  D’Annunzio never joined the Fascist Party though he signed the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals in 1925 and later avoided open criticism of Mussolini’s regime. 

     No state except perhaps the Bavarian Soviet Republic led by playwright Ernst Toller and the equally brief revolutionary government of Berlin during the same post-WWI period which named Dadaists to the Culture Ministry, has expressed greater regard for the arts than the Regency of Canaro.  A place of unprecedented importance was given art in the Carta, with music to be publicly financed as “the fundamental principle of the state.”  Yet the anti-fascism of the time, like the artistic avant-garde, included irregular, destabilizing, bohemian, and even criminal elements.  From their origin, the Arditi were known for their fearsomeness; they were often photographed holding daggers in their teeth.  Drug use, particularly cocaine, nudism, and homosexuality were widespread in their ranks.  Carnaro resorted to piracy and drug-running to raise cash.   

     Fiume’s partisans studied yoga and karate, and D’Annunzio’s “secretary of action” Guido Keller established the "Unione di spiriti liberi tendenti alla perfezione" (“Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection”) which anticipated the Nazi Party in the use of the swastika as symbol.  Himself an eccentric drug-user and pansexualist, he was an early fascist fond of sleeping nude in trees.  Other factions in the freewheeling community of Fiume resembled elements of later counter-cultural movements, included advocates of a back-to-the-land, pre-industrial lifestyle, devotees of various Asian mystical cults, those who sought utopia in the cultivation of the perfect orgasm, and those who foresaw a “Dionysus race” when humanity would come together in pursuit of pleasure. 

     Out of such a disorderly and unlikely background arose the anti-fascist Arditi del Popolo in 1921.  Founded by Argo Secondari, an anarchist and veteran of the WWI Arditi; Giuseppe Mingrino, a labor leader and politician; Gino Lucetti, an anarchist who was to try to assassinate Mussolini in 1926; and Guido Picelli, who had been active in the Italian Socialist Party and the Red Guards or Proletarian Defense Formations.  Its core membership was WWI veterans and its job was to defend union halls and left-wing publications and events from fascist attack.  They were not associated and in fact were sometimes condemned by the less militant parties of the left including the Communists. 

     The group most identified with the name Antifa, however, is the German Antifaschistische Aktion of 1932=1933.  They were unapologetic street fighters, meeting the violence of stormtroopers in kind.  Following the Nazi accession to power, they were obliged to disband while some cadres went underground.  Following the lead of the Comintern during the “Third Period” or “class against class” era, they had rejected other leftist groups, calling socialists “social fascists,” and occasionally even working with Nazis (for instance, in the move to dissolve the Landtag in Prussia in 1931).  The adoption of the Antifaschistische Aktion by the German Communist Party marked a return to a broader popular front as the Communists recognized the severity of the threat from the right. 

     Toward the very end of WWII groups calling themselves more broadly based Antifaschistische Ausschüsse or Antifaschistische Kommittees, comprised for the most part of leftists but also including democrats and anti-Nazi Christians began to act to denounce Nazi criminals and partisans and to organize postwar society.  They were short-lived due to the Allied proscription of political organizing in their zones and the Stalinist absorption of such groups in the Soviet zone. 

     Another group using the name antifa was associated with the Zionist-Marxist party, the Paole Zion (Workers of Zion).  This group, which had members in many Jewish communities, had established the Hashomer Guard to protect pioneering Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1909.  Paole Zion members fought in the Russian Revolution as the Borochov Brigade and later formed the Jewish Communist Party.  Those in Warsaw during WWII joined with allies to form the ZOB or Jewish Fighting Organization (in Polish, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; in Yiddish ייִדישע קאַמף אָרגאַניזאַציע‎ or Yidishe Kamf Organizatsie) which played a critical role in the Warsaw and  Białystok Ghetto Uprisings. 

     A militia called the Minutemen in patriotic emulation of the eighteenth-century Revolutionary citizen-soldiers was formed in Newark, New Jersey to disrupt rallies of the American Nazis of the German-American Bund and the Catholic bigots of Father Coughlin’s Christian Crusade.  Its core group was a group of enforcers organized by mob boss Abner “Longie” Zwillman whose point man in the operation was ex-prize fighter Sidney Nathan Abramowitz (aka  “Nat Arno”).  The organization functioned from 1933 until 1941 and, while they sometimes coordinated protests with the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, their specialty was street-fighting.

     The modern antifa in America, insofar as it exists at all, has origins in Anti-Racist Action (ARA), later known as the Torch Network, which itself grew from the Baldies, a formation of the Minneapolis punk scene which spread then nationwide. Their Portland, Oregon affiliate, Rose City Antifa was the first to use the term in their name.  Other groups followed suit, including some with no organizational ties to the ARA, such as NYC Antifa.  Some American formations retain elements of the punk scene, including the willingness to shock.

     The government’s recent decision to label members of Texas Direct Action as antifa and to sentence them to unjustifiably lengthy prison terms indicates the punitive and fraudulent way in which the extreme right seeks to conceive of the movement.  Those with a clearer historical and analytic view of the meaning of the term need to educate others about the mixed but overwhelmingly positive role played by militant anti-fascists for over a hundred years.  Everyone of good will is surely antifascist – the current proponents of militarism, chauvinism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny would find little following if things were called by their right names.  Fighting fascism is everyone’s struggle, and, if the record of the people’s organizations is imperfect in some ways. antifa has regularly been on the side of the angels.