Over the years – and long before us and no doubt after us – we have written about and against fascism and its many incarnations and have shared the words of many authors better than us who have written about the same, with the aim of trying to comprehend and modestly contribute to anti-fascist thought and practice.
But as Karl Polanyi noted some years ago, fascism is a virus that lives within the body of capitalism and though it may be beaten back and seemingly rooted out of the social body, it only remains dormant and always attentive to exploit weaknesses in the our imperfect immunity to it.
In other words, fascism resides within capitalism as a permanent possibility, not only as a rearguard to defend capitalist exploitation, but as a sort of illness, an ethical corruption, that seeps deeply into the social fabric. Anti-fascism can only then make sense as anti-capitalism, but anti-capitalism in the broadest sense possible; as the permanent struggle against not only capitalist social relations, but against the conditions that render those social relations possible: the hierarchical oppression and violent dispossession of what renders free, creative life possible.
We share below as one more and by no means final contribution to the understanding of fascism a chapter from Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017, and this with the recent French parliamentary elections in the background (elections in which the far right party Rassemblement National won the first round of the elections and threatened to win the elections overall, only to be cut short by a second round in which the left-wing coalition, the Nouveau Front populaire, garnered the largest popular vote).
This chapter briefly analyzes five lessons that many antifascists draw, or, I believe, should draw from history. Each lesson begins with a more factual description of a given phenomenon before moving into an anti-fascist interpretation of the historical facts in question. Like all historical phenomena, these facts are subject to multiple interpretations. These are not the only lessons from this history, but they shed light on some of the historically informed underpinnings of antifascism.
1. Fascists revolutions have never succeeded. Fascists gained power legally.
First, some important facts: Mussolini’s march on Rome was merely a spectacle legitimizing his prior invitation to form a government. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 failed miserably. His eventual accession to power came when President Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. The Enabling Act that granted him complete power was passed by parliament.
For militant anti-fascists, those historical facts have cast doubt on the liberal formula for opposing fascism. That formula essentially amounts to faith in reasoned debate to counteract fascist ideas, in the police to counteract fascist violence, and in the institutions of parliamentary government to counteract fascist attempts to seize power. There is no doubt that sometimes this formula has worked. There is also no doubt that sometimes it has not.
Fascism and Nazism emerged as emotional, antirational appeals grounded in masculine promises of renewed national vigor. While political argumentation is always important in appealing to the potential popular base of fascism, its sharpness is blunted when confronted with ideologies that reject the terms of rational debate. Rationality did not stop the Fascists or the Nazis. While reason is always necessary, it is unfortunately insufficient on its own from an anti-fascist perspective.
Thus, it’s no surprise that history shows that parliamentary government is not always a barrier to fascism. To the contrary, on several occasions it has been more of a red carpet. When interwar economic and political elites felt sufficiently threatened by the prospect of revolution, they turned to figures like Mussolini and Hitler to ruthlessly crush dissent and protect private property. While it would be a mistake to entirely reduce fascism to a last resort of an endangered capitalist system, that element of its composition played an important, and at times decisive, role in its fortunes. When interwar authoritarian leaders felt much less threatened, they often implemented fascistic policies from above. For most revolutionaries, this means that anti-fascism must necessarily be anticapitalist. As long as capitalism continues to foment class struggle, they argue, fascism will always loom in the background as an authoritarian solution to popular upheaval.
As for the police counteracting fascist violence – at times the police have arrested and persecuted fascists, yet the historical record shows that along with the military they have also been among the most eager for a “return to order.” Studies show that high percentages of police voted for Golden Dawn and the Front National over the past few years.354 In the United States, it is clear that many police welcomed Trump as a “Blue Lives Matter” president who would allow law enforcement to continue its harassment and murder of communities of color unimpeded. Recently it was revealed that the FBI has been investigating alarmingly (though not surprisingly) high levels of white-supremacist infiltration into law enforcement for decades.[1] Moreover, regardless of the composition of the U.S. police force, the fact that it developed out of Southern slave patrols and Northern opposition to the labor movement gives us insight into its role in the white-supremacist criminal “justice” system.
All of which is to say that the fact that fascist revolts have always failed should not lessen concerns about fascist insurrectionism. The fascist “strategy of tension” in Italy, the development of the lone-wolf concept of “leaderless resistance” promoted by the American Klan leader Louis Beam, and the fascist armed struggle that developed on both sides of the Euromaidan conflicts in Ukraine attest to the material danger of insurrectionary fascist violence.[2] Nevertheless, historically fascism has gained entry to the halls of power not by smashing down the gates, but by convincing the gatekeepers to politely swing them open.
2.To varying degrees, many interwar anti-fascist leaders and theorists assumed that fascism was simply a variant of traditional counterrevolutionary politics. They did not take it seriously enough until it was too late.
As long as there has been revolution, there has been counterrevolution. For every storming of the Bastille there was a Thermidor. After the Paris Commune, hundreds were executed and thousands imprisoned and deported. More than five thousand political prisoners were executed and thirty-eight thousand imprisoned after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution,
which also witnessed 690 anti-Semitic pogroms that killed more than three thousand.[3] European radicals and ethnic minorities were by no means alien to the violence of traditional reaction.
Yet, fascism represented something new. Fascist ideological, technological, and bureaucratic innovations created a vehicle for the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world to bring its wars of extermination home.
Unsurprisingly, many leftist commentators initially conceptualized fascism within the parameters of existing counterrevolutionary forces. According to the Workers’ Socialist Federation, Italian Fascists were “in the strictest sense a White Guard,” referring to the counterrevolutionaries of the Russian Revolution. The Communist Party of Great Britain called them “the Italian Black and Tans,” referring to the British counterrevolutionary forces in the Irish War of Independence. In the 1920s, some Marxists used Hungarian Communist Georg Lukacs’s analysis of “white terror” to argue that Mussolini’s squadristi were merely a non-ideological bulwark of the ruling class.[4]
On the other hand, a number of commentators did highlight fascism’s unique features. They recognized the novelty of its nationalist flirtation with socialism, its populist elitism. They observed how previously antagonistic sectors like traditional landowners and bourgeois capitalists could form a united counterrevolutionary movement.[5] The Marxist focus on the underlying class dynamics of fascism revealed elements of this puzzling new doctrine that centrist observers failed to grasp. Yet that focus also tended to limit the potential danger that fascism could pose to the confines of its alleged role as bodyguard to the ruling class, and so Marxists and many others therefore failed to anticipate how the scope of its violence would greatly extend beyond that which was “necessary” to safeguard capitalist enterprise. Moreover, although interwar fascism developed out of mainly middle-class constituencies with upper-class backing, as fascist movements grew they sometimes, though not always, attracted working-class support—a fact that Marxists were slow to come to terms with fully.
Regardless of the content of their analysis, however, many socialist and communist politicians did not lead as if the very existence of their movements hung in the balance. The Italian socialists signed the Pact of Pacification with Mussolini in 1921, and neither they nor the communists thought that Mussolini’s rise to power represented anything more than the latest rightward swing in the age-old rhythmic pendulum of bourgeois parliamentary politics. In that way, they were not entirely dissimilar to the majority of Spanish socialists who collaborated with Primo de Rivera’s somewhat fascistic military government in the 1920s. In Germany, the communists believed that fascism had already arrived when the “presidential governments” of the early 1930s started to rule by decree. Yet, neither the allegedly fascist “presidential governments” nor the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler convinced party leadership that they faced an existential threat. For the KPD leadership, fascism did not call for resistance by any means necessary, but patience. Their slogan was “First Hitler, then us.” At the turn of the century, leftists had reason to anticipate that eras of repression would come and go. Fascism changed the rules of the game.
The first substantive recognition of the essence of the fascist peril came with the “February Uprising” of 1934 when Austrian socialists fought back against the authoritarian chancellor Dollfuss’s raids on socialist centers (which were instigated by Mussolini). The uprising was brutally suppressed, leaving two hundred dead, three hundred wounded, and the party outlawed.[6] Yet, their bravery inspired the Spanish socialist miners who rebelled later that year in Asturias. Their slogan was “Better Vienna than Berlin,” where Hitler’s rise to power was not opposed by force. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out, anti-fascism was widely understood to be a desperate struggle against extermination.
The tendency of leftist theorists and politicians to excessively conceptualize fascism based on the paradigm of traditional counterrevolution hindered the ability of the Left to adjust to the new threat it faced. Since the shape of resistance must always be calibrated against that which is being resisted, it is incumbent upon anti-fascists to continually reevaluate their theoretical, strategic, and tactical arsenals based on shifts in the ideology and praxis of their far-right adversaries. Matthew N. Lyons put this lesson into practice by critiquing writers who argue that the “alt-right” should merely be called neo-Nazis. While many alt-right are clearly neo-Nazis, Lyons argues that this “embodies the unfortunate idea that white-supremacist politics are basically all the same . . . that we don’t need to understand our enemy.”[7] Conceiving of the enemy in terms of a dated paradigm cost interwar anti-fascists dearly. At some point, the evolution of the Far Right might even mean transcending the framework of “fascism” altogether, as we move further and further away from the twentieth century.
It is essential for anti-fascists to develop a clear and precise understanding of fascism. Yet in order to understand the robust and flexible nature of anti-fascist politics we must recognize the relationship between two of the many registers of anti-fascism: analytical and moral.
The analytical register consists of mobilizing historically informed definitions and interpretations of fascism to craft anti-fascist strategy suited to the specific challenges of facing ideologically fascist groups and movements. Methods of confronting neo-Nazi groups may not make sense against other far-right formations. Understanding the difference between them should inform strategic and tactical choices.
The moral register developed out of the rhetorical power of the “fascist” epithet—of calling someone or something fascist—in the postwar period. It comes into play when the antifascist lens is applied to phenomena that may not be fascist, technically speaking, but are fascistic.
For example, were the Black Panthers wrong to call cops who killed black people with impunity “fascist pigs” if they did not personally hold fascist beliefs or if the American government was not literally fascist? At a Madrid antifa demonstration, I saw a rainbow flag with the slogan “homophobia is fascism.” Does the existence of non-fascist homophobes invalidate the argument? Were the guerrillas who fought against Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile misguided to call their struggle “anti-fascist” if, according to most historians, these regimes were not technically fascist?
As we have discussed, it is important to analyze each of these cases and many more in order to develop a finely tuned analysis. Yet, the moral register of anti-fascism understands how “fascism” has become a moral signifier that those struggling against a variety of oppressions have utilized to highlight the ferocity of the political foes they have faced and the elements of continuity they share with actual fascism. Franco’s Spain may have been more of a traditionalist Catholic military regime than fascism per se, but such differences mattered little to those who were hunted down by the Civil Guard.
The challenges of defining fascism make the line between these two registers blurry. Moreover, the analytical register contains a moral critique just as the moral register entails a loose analysis of the relationship between a given source of oppression and fascism. While it is true that at a certain point the “fascist” epithet loses some of its power if it is applied too widely, a key component of anti-fascism is to organize against both fascist and fascistic politics in solidarity with all those who suffer and struggle. Matters of definition should influence our strategies and tactics, not our solidarity.
3. For ideological and organizational reasons, socialist and communist leadership was often slower to accurately assess the threat of fascism, and slower to advocate militant anti-fascist responses, than their parties’ rank-and-file membership.
Since many socialists and communists initially considered fascism to be a variant of traditional counterrevolutionary politics, they focused on each other far more than their fascist enemies. Both factions reasoned that if they could unite the proletariat under their leadership, it wouldn’t matter what right-wing obstacles they might face.
Thus, while some rank-and-file socialists stayed with the Arditi del Popolo to fight against the Black Shirts in Italy in the early 1920s, the party leadership pulled out in order to continue along its legalistic electoral path. When that path was definitively blocked, the party struggled to change course.
And similarly throughout the era: German socialists adhered to a strictly legalistic course in the 1920s and ’30s despite the increasing unease of party members. Although socialists in the Reichsbanner and later the Iron Front pushed for more aggressive measures, the torpid party apparatus was ill-equipped to consider alternative strategies. Likewise, the rank and file of Austrian socialism struggled to push their party leadership toward militant self-defense in the face of a far-right onslaught in the 1920s and ’30s.[8] In Britain, rank-and-file members of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress physically confronted fascists in the street despite their leaders’ admonitions. Labour leadership even condemned its members who participated in the Battle of Cable Street – when various groups confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marching through the Jewish section of London’s East End – and refused to support the many Labour Party members who joined the International Brigades in Spain.[9] As historian Larry Ceplair argued, the social democrats “had played the parliamentary game too long, and [their] leaders had become ideologically and psychologically incapable of organizing, ordering, or approving armed resistance or preventative revolution.”[10]
Nonetheless, many individual socialists, who were far less encumbered by legalistic party ideology and master-plan electoral strategy, seem to have been more sensitive to changing conditions on the ground and far more eager to take the fight to fascism.
In the early 1920s, the Communist International believed that the most pressing task for the revolution was to draw a clear and antagonistic distinction between Marxism-Leninism and social democracy so they could lead the insurgent wave that seemed to be engulfing the continent. This goal returned to the fore with the start of the Comintern’s “third period” in 1928. The Leninist organizational model of “Democratic Centralism” dictated a disciplined chain of command from the Comintern in Moscow down through national parties to regional branches and neighborhood cadre. This model allowed the international communist movement to act in unison across vast geographic expanses, but it also often meant that internecine squabbles among party elite in Moscow had a greater impact on policy than local conditions.
The “social fascist” line was one such example. Many national leaders adopted it grudgingly and abandoned it eagerly with the Comintern shift to the Popular Front policy in 1935. Rank-and-file communists and socialists generally did not hate each other nearly as much as their leaders did. In fact, early unity initiatives between socialists and communists in France and Austria, for example, developed from below.[11] These examples demonstrate some of the drawbacks of hierarchical organization.
4. Fascism steals from left ideology, strategy, imagery, and culture.
Fascism and Nazism developed out of the desire to free nationalism, militarism, and masculinity from the “decadent” capitalist bourgeoisie at the heads of the Italian and German governments, and to capture collectivist popular politics from the “degenerate” socialist left. Even before Hitler took over, the German Workers’ Party used a healthy dose of red on their flags and posters, and members called each other “comrade.”[12] This produced anti-ideological, antirational paradoxes like “national syndicalism” and “national socialism.” “Left” Fascists and Nazis were purged as their parties gained power and cozied up to the economic elite, but the nationalist co-optation of the rhetoric of working-class populism played a key role in getting them there.
The Nazis created their own labor exchanges to provide jobs to the unemployed based on their good relations with businessmen. In some ways, this was a class-collaborationist variation on the role of the union as a gateway toward employment in an industry. Nazi Storm Trooper taverns clearly grew out of the tradition of socialist taverns dating back to the nineteenth century.
The Nazis also provided free food and shelter for supporters amid the Great Depression. This was a marked departure from traditional conservatives who showed disdain for the poor and unemployed and at most contributed occasionally to apolitical or religious charities.
This model of far-right political charity has been adopted by the Greek Golden Dawn, the Italian CasaPound, the Hogar Social Madrid, and the British National Action, all of whom have started giving out free food and groceries to ethnic Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, and “whites” only. CasaPound activists started imitating autonomous squatters by occupying abandoned buildings, and Hogar Social Madrid not only started squatting but even on occasion organizing against the eviction of ethnic Spaniards in a clear attempt to capitalize on Spain’s vibrant left-wing housing-rights movement.
More broadly, postwar fascists continued to turn to the revolutionary Left for strategic insights. The “Third Position” fascists sought to apply Maoist theories of third-world revolution, to the goal of “European liberation,” which would entail forcibly removing “non-Europeans.” In the 1980s, a faction of French Troisième Voie (Third Way) sought to use “a ‘Trotskyist’ strategy” to burrow into the Front National in order to take it over from within. Ukrainian fascists have sought to appropriate the legacy of the Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, while the Spanish fascist Bases Autónomas lauded the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti.[13]
Starting in the late 1980s and early ’90s, though gaining force in the late 2000s, fascists across Europe have even started to copy the black bloc tactic of the German Autonomen. These black-clad “Autonomous Nationalists,” who sometimes use the anti-fascist flags logo with national socialist slogans or wear Palestinian kaffiyehs, have attempted to mimic the appeal of the radical Left by championing anticapitalism, antimilitarism, and anti-Zionism in Germany, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, England, Romania, Sweden, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. This tendency started to decline in Western Europe around 2013. “National-Anarchism” is another new variation on this theme. “National-Anarchists” abuse the anarchist concept of autonomy to argue for separate, homogenous “ethnic enclaves,” including a whites-only homeland.[14]
Many more examples could be cited, but these are sufficient to demonstrate how anti-fascism is not only about venturing outward to oppose fascism but also about guarding Against the Fascist Creep, as the title of Alexander Reid Ross’s marvelous work suggests. They also demonstrate the importance of left ideology. Without establishing how they fit together, concepts like “autonomy,” “national liberation,” or even “socialism,” and tactics like squatting, organizing food drives, or forming black blocs, can be co-opted under our noses.
5. It doesn’t take that many fascists to make fascism.
In 1919 Mussolini’s fasci had a hundred members. When Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922 only about 7 to 8 percent of the Italian population, and only thirty-five of the more than five hundred members of parliament, belonged to his PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista). The German Workers’ Party only had fifty-four members when Hitler attended his first meeting after the First World War. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, only about 1.3 percent of the population belonged to the NSDAP (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[15]369 Across Europe, massive fascist parties emerged out of what were initially small nuclei during the interwar period. More recently, the electoral success of many previously miniscule fascist(ic) parties after the financial crisis of 2008, and the recent wave of migration, has demonstrated the potential for rapid far-right growth when circumstances become favorable.
Certainly these parties grew, and these regimes consolidated their power, by winning the support of conservative elites, anxious industrialists, alienated small-business owners, unemployed nationalists, and others. Triumphant postwar resistance narratives may have denied that any but the most committed fascist ideologues supported figures like Mussolini or Hitler, but in fact both regimes managed to cultivate broad popular support, thereby blurring our understanding of what it meant to be a Fascist or a Nazi in the 1930s. In that sense, it took quite a few fascists to make fascism. The point being made here, however, is that before they achieved such popular support, Fascists and Nazis were but tiny groups of ideologues.
But meanwhile, it’s important to note that, as Mussolini assembled a rag-tag group of a hundred bitter veterans and quirky nationalistic socialists, and Hitler fought for leadership of the tiny German Workers’ Party, Italy and Germany were seemingly on the verge of social revolution. There was no reason for the Left to have batted an eye at either development. These tiny groups could not have been more irrelevant.
Given what anarchists, communists, and socialists knew at the time, there is no reason for them to have devoted any time or attention to the early days of fascism. Yet, one cannot help but wonder what might have happened if they had. This is an impossible counterfactual to address seriously, and dwelling on it excessively omits the larger societal factors that set the stage for the rise of fascism. Nevertheless, anti-fascists have concluded that since the future is unwritten, and fascism often emerges out of small, marginal groups, every fascist or white-supremacist group should be treated as if they could be Mussolini’s one hundred fasci, or the fifty-four members of the German Workers’ Party that provided Hitler’s first stepping stone.
The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d’être is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past seventy years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know—and that’s a very good thing indeed.
[1] Alice Speri, “The FBI has quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement,” The Intercept, January 31, 2017: https: //theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigatedwhite-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/.
[2] Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Oakland: AK Press, 2017), 115.
[3] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), 197, 201.
[4] Keith Hodgson, Fighting Fascism: The British Left and the Rise of Fascism, 1919–36 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 51, 55.
[6] Paula Sutter Fichtner, Historical Dictionary of Austria Second Edition (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009), 96–97.
[7] Matthew N. Lyons, “Calling them ‘alt-right’ helps us fight them,” threewayfight, Nov. 22, 2016: https://threewayfight.blogspot. com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html.
[8] Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War, 68–69; Julius Deutsch, Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, Gabriel Kuhn, ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2017).
[12] Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 151.
[13] Ibid., 163; Ross, Against the Fascist Creep, 89–90, 140–141, 170–172.
[14] “Les autonomes nationalistes en Allemagne” Reflexes, November 12, 2009: http://reflexes.samizdat.net/les-autonomes-nationalistes-enallemagne-mefiez-vous-des-imitations/; Maik Fielitz, “Militanter Neonazismus in Griechenland,” Antifaschistisches Infoblatt, March 13, 2016: https://www.antifainfoblatt.de/artikel/militanter-neonazismusgriechenland; Ross, Against the Fascist Creep, 217–229, 284.
[15] Payne, A History of Fascism, 151, 287; Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 24.
Mark Bray: Five Historical Lessons for Anti-Fascists
Over the years – and long before us and no doubt after us – we have written about and against fascism and its many incarnations and have shared the words of many authors better than us who have written about the same, with the aim of trying to comprehend and modestly contribute to anti-fascist thought and practice.
But as Karl Polanyi noted some years ago, fascism is a virus that lives within the body of capitalism and though it may be beaten back and seemingly rooted out of the social body, it only remains dormant and always attentive to exploit weaknesses in the our imperfect immunity to it.
In other words, fascism resides within capitalism as a permanent possibility, not only as a rearguard to defend capitalist exploitation, but as a sort of illness, an ethical corruption, that seeps deeply into the social fabric. Anti-fascism can only then make sense as anti-capitalism, but anti-capitalism in the broadest sense possible; as the permanent struggle against not only capitalist social relations, but against the conditions that render those social relations possible: the hierarchical oppression and violent dispossession of what renders free, creative life possible.
We share below as one more and by no means final contribution to the understanding of fascism a chapter from Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017, and this with the recent French parliamentary elections in the background (elections in which the far right party Rassemblement National won the first round of the elections and threatened to win the elections overall, only to be cut short by a second round in which the left-wing coalition, the Nouveau Front populaire, garnered the largest popular vote).
This chapter briefly analyzes five lessons that many antifascists draw, or, I believe, should draw from history. Each lesson begins with a more factual description of a given phenomenon before moving into an anti-fascist interpretation of the historical facts in question. Like all historical phenomena, these facts are subject to multiple interpretations. These are not the only lessons from this history, but they shed light on some of the historically informed underpinnings of antifascism.
1. Fascists revolutions have never succeeded. Fascists gained power legally.
First, some important facts: Mussolini’s march on Rome was merely a spectacle legitimizing his prior invitation to form a government. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 failed miserably. His eventual accession to power came when President Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. The Enabling Act that granted him complete power was passed by parliament.
For militant anti-fascists, those historical facts have cast doubt on the liberal formula for opposing fascism. That formula essentially amounts to faith in reasoned debate to counteract fascist ideas, in the police to counteract fascist violence, and in the institutions of parliamentary government to counteract fascist attempts to seize power. There is no doubt that sometimes this formula has worked. There is also no doubt that sometimes it has not.
Fascism and Nazism emerged as emotional, antirational appeals grounded in masculine promises of renewed national vigor. While political argumentation is always important in appealing to the potential popular base of fascism, its sharpness is blunted when confronted with ideologies that reject the terms of rational debate. Rationality did not stop the Fascists or the Nazis. While reason is always necessary, it is unfortunately insufficient on its own from an anti-fascist perspective.
Thus, it’s no surprise that history shows that parliamentary government is not always a barrier to fascism. To the contrary, on several occasions it has been more of a red carpet. When interwar economic and political elites felt sufficiently threatened by the prospect of revolution, they turned to figures like Mussolini and Hitler to ruthlessly crush dissent and protect private property. While it would be a mistake to entirely reduce fascism to a last resort of an endangered capitalist system, that element of its composition played an important, and at times decisive, role in its fortunes. When interwar authoritarian leaders felt much less threatened, they often implemented fascistic policies from above. For most revolutionaries, this means that anti-fascism must necessarily be anticapitalist. As long as capitalism continues to foment class struggle, they argue, fascism will always loom in the background as an authoritarian solution to popular upheaval.
As for the police counteracting fascist violence – at times the police have arrested and persecuted fascists, yet the historical record shows that along with the military they have also been among the most eager for a “return to order.” Studies show that high percentages of police voted for Golden Dawn and the Front National over the past few years.354 In the United States, it is clear that many police welcomed Trump as a “Blue Lives Matter” president who would allow law enforcement to continue its harassment and murder of communities of color unimpeded. Recently it was revealed that the FBI has been investigating alarmingly (though not surprisingly) high levels of white-supremacist infiltration into law enforcement for decades.[1] Moreover, regardless of the composition of the U.S. police force, the fact that it developed out of Southern slave patrols and Northern opposition to the labor movement gives us insight into its role in the white-supremacist criminal “justice” system.
All of which is to say that the fact that fascist revolts have always failed should not lessen concerns about fascist insurrectionism. The fascist “strategy of tension” in Italy, the development of the lone-wolf concept of “leaderless resistance” promoted by the American Klan leader Louis Beam, and the fascist armed struggle that developed on both sides of the Euromaidan conflicts in Ukraine attest to the material danger of insurrectionary fascist violence.[2] Nevertheless, historically fascism has gained entry to the halls of power not by smashing down the gates, but by convincing the gatekeepers to politely swing them open.
2.To varying degrees, many interwar anti-fascist leaders and theorists assumed that fascism was simply a variant of traditional counterrevolutionary politics. They did not take it seriously enough until it was too late.
As long as there has been revolution, there has been counterrevolution. For every storming of the Bastille there was a Thermidor. After the Paris Commune, hundreds were executed and thousands imprisoned and deported. More than five thousand political prisoners were executed and thirty-eight thousand imprisoned after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution,
which also witnessed 690 anti-Semitic pogroms that killed more than three thousand.[3] European radicals and ethnic minorities were by no means alien to the violence of traditional reaction.
Yet, fascism represented something new. Fascist ideological, technological, and bureaucratic innovations created a vehicle for the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world to bring its wars of extermination home.
Unsurprisingly, many leftist commentators initially conceptualized fascism within the parameters of existing counterrevolutionary forces. According to the Workers’ Socialist Federation, Italian Fascists were “in the strictest sense a White Guard,” referring to the counterrevolutionaries of the Russian Revolution. The Communist Party of Great Britain called them “the Italian Black and Tans,” referring to the British counterrevolutionary forces in the Irish War of Independence. In the 1920s, some Marxists used Hungarian Communist Georg Lukacs’s analysis of “white terror” to argue that Mussolini’s squadristi were merely a non-ideological bulwark of the ruling class.[4]
On the other hand, a number of commentators did highlight fascism’s unique features. They recognized the novelty of its nationalist flirtation with socialism, its populist elitism. They observed how previously antagonistic sectors like traditional landowners and bourgeois capitalists could form a united counterrevolutionary movement.[5] The Marxist focus on the underlying class dynamics of fascism revealed elements of this puzzling new doctrine that centrist observers failed to grasp. Yet that focus also tended to limit the potential danger that fascism could pose to the confines of its alleged role as bodyguard to the ruling class, and so Marxists and many others therefore failed to anticipate how the scope of its violence would greatly extend beyond that which was “necessary” to safeguard capitalist enterprise. Moreover, although interwar fascism developed out of mainly middle-class constituencies with upper-class backing, as fascist movements grew they sometimes, though not always, attracted working-class support—a fact that Marxists were slow to come to terms with fully.
Regardless of the content of their analysis, however, many socialist and communist politicians did not lead as if the very existence of their movements hung in the balance. The Italian socialists signed the Pact of Pacification with Mussolini in 1921, and neither they nor the communists thought that Mussolini’s rise to power represented anything more than the latest rightward swing in the age-old rhythmic pendulum of bourgeois parliamentary politics. In that way, they were not entirely dissimilar to the majority of Spanish socialists who collaborated with Primo de Rivera’s somewhat fascistic military government in the 1920s. In Germany, the communists believed that fascism had already arrived when the “presidential governments” of the early 1930s started to rule by decree. Yet, neither the allegedly fascist “presidential governments” nor the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler convinced party leadership that they faced an existential threat. For the KPD leadership, fascism did not call for resistance by any means necessary, but patience. Their slogan was “First Hitler, then us.” At the turn of the century, leftists had reason to anticipate that eras of repression would come and go. Fascism changed the rules of the game.
The first substantive recognition of the essence of the fascist peril came with the “February Uprising” of 1934 when Austrian socialists fought back against the authoritarian chancellor Dollfuss’s raids on socialist centers (which were instigated by Mussolini). The uprising was brutally suppressed, leaving two hundred dead, three hundred wounded, and the party outlawed.[6] Yet, their bravery inspired the Spanish socialist miners who rebelled later that year in Asturias. Their slogan was “Better Vienna than Berlin,” where Hitler’s rise to power was not opposed by force. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out, anti-fascism was widely understood to be a desperate struggle against extermination.
The tendency of leftist theorists and politicians to excessively conceptualize fascism based on the paradigm of traditional counterrevolution hindered the ability of the Left to adjust to the new threat it faced. Since the shape of resistance must always be calibrated against that which is being resisted, it is incumbent upon anti-fascists to continually reevaluate their theoretical, strategic, and tactical arsenals based on shifts in the ideology and praxis of their far-right adversaries. Matthew N. Lyons put this lesson into practice by critiquing writers who argue that the “alt-right” should merely be called neo-Nazis. While many alt-right are clearly neo-Nazis, Lyons argues that this “embodies the unfortunate idea that white-supremacist politics are basically all the same . . . that we don’t need to understand our enemy.”[7] Conceiving of the enemy in terms of a dated paradigm cost interwar anti-fascists dearly. At some point, the evolution of the Far Right might even mean transcending the framework of “fascism” altogether, as we move further and further away from the twentieth century.
It is essential for anti-fascists to develop a clear and precise understanding of fascism. Yet in order to understand the robust and flexible nature of anti-fascist politics we must recognize the relationship between two of the many registers of anti-fascism: analytical and moral.
The analytical register consists of mobilizing historically informed definitions and interpretations of fascism to craft anti-fascist strategy suited to the specific challenges of facing ideologically fascist groups and movements. Methods of confronting neo-Nazi groups may not make sense against other far-right formations. Understanding the difference between them should inform strategic and tactical choices.
The moral register developed out of the rhetorical power of the “fascist” epithet—of calling someone or something fascist—in the postwar period. It comes into play when the antifascist lens is applied to phenomena that may not be fascist, technically speaking, but are fascistic.
For example, were the Black Panthers wrong to call cops who killed black people with impunity “fascist pigs” if they did not personally hold fascist beliefs or if the American government was not literally fascist? At a Madrid antifa demonstration, I saw a rainbow flag with the slogan “homophobia is fascism.” Does the existence of non-fascist homophobes invalidate the argument? Were the guerrillas who fought against Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile misguided to call their struggle “anti-fascist” if, according to most historians, these regimes were not technically fascist?
As we have discussed, it is important to analyze each of these cases and many more in order to develop a finely tuned analysis. Yet, the moral register of anti-fascism understands how “fascism” has become a moral signifier that those struggling against a variety of oppressions have utilized to highlight the ferocity of the political foes they have faced and the elements of continuity they share with actual fascism. Franco’s Spain may have been more of a traditionalist Catholic military regime than fascism per se, but such differences mattered little to those who were hunted down by the Civil Guard.
The challenges of defining fascism make the line between these two registers blurry. Moreover, the analytical register contains a moral critique just as the moral register entails a loose analysis of the relationship between a given source of oppression and fascism. While it is true that at a certain point the “fascist” epithet loses some of its power if it is applied too widely, a key component of anti-fascism is to organize against both fascist and fascistic politics in solidarity with all those who suffer and struggle. Matters of definition should influence our strategies and tactics, not our solidarity.
3. For ideological and organizational reasons, socialist and communist leadership was often slower to accurately assess the threat of fascism, and slower to advocate militant anti-fascist responses, than their parties’ rank-and-file membership.
Since many socialists and communists initially considered fascism to be a variant of traditional counterrevolutionary politics, they focused on each other far more than their fascist enemies. Both factions reasoned that if they could unite the proletariat under their leadership, it wouldn’t matter what right-wing obstacles they might face.
Thus, while some rank-and-file socialists stayed with the Arditi del Popolo to fight against the Black Shirts in Italy in the early 1920s, the party leadership pulled out in order to continue along its legalistic electoral path. When that path was definitively blocked, the party struggled to change course.
And similarly throughout the era: German socialists adhered to a strictly legalistic course in the 1920s and ’30s despite the increasing unease of party members. Although socialists in the Reichsbanner and later the Iron Front pushed for more aggressive measures, the torpid party apparatus was ill-equipped to consider alternative strategies. Likewise, the rank and file of Austrian socialism struggled to push their party leadership toward militant self-defense in the face of a far-right onslaught in the 1920s and ’30s.[8] In Britain, rank-and-file members of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress physically confronted fascists in the street despite their leaders’ admonitions. Labour leadership even condemned its members who participated in the Battle of Cable Street – when various groups confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marching through the Jewish section of London’s East End – and refused to support the many Labour Party members who joined the International Brigades in Spain.[9] As historian Larry Ceplair argued, the social democrats “had played the parliamentary game too long, and [their] leaders had become ideologically and psychologically incapable of organizing, ordering, or approving armed resistance or preventative revolution.”[10]
Nonetheless, many individual socialists, who were far less encumbered by legalistic party ideology and master-plan electoral strategy, seem to have been more sensitive to changing conditions on the ground and far more eager to take the fight to fascism.
In the early 1920s, the Communist International believed that the most pressing task for the revolution was to draw a clear and antagonistic distinction between Marxism-Leninism and social democracy so they could lead the insurgent wave that seemed to be engulfing the continent. This goal returned to the fore with the start of the Comintern’s “third period” in 1928. The Leninist organizational model of “Democratic Centralism” dictated a disciplined chain of command from the Comintern in Moscow down through national parties to regional branches and neighborhood cadre. This model allowed the international communist movement to act in unison across vast geographic expanses, but it also often meant that internecine squabbles among party elite in Moscow had a greater impact on policy than local conditions.
The “social fascist” line was one such example. Many national leaders adopted it grudgingly and abandoned it eagerly with the Comintern shift to the Popular Front policy in 1935. Rank-and-file communists and socialists generally did not hate each other nearly as much as their leaders did. In fact, early unity initiatives between socialists and communists in France and Austria, for example, developed from below.[11] These examples demonstrate some of the drawbacks of hierarchical organization.
4. Fascism steals from left ideology, strategy, imagery, and culture.
Fascism and Nazism developed out of the desire to free nationalism, militarism, and masculinity from the “decadent” capitalist bourgeoisie at the heads of the Italian and German governments, and to capture collectivist popular politics from the “degenerate” socialist left. Even before Hitler took over, the German Workers’ Party used a healthy dose of red on their flags and posters, and members called each other “comrade.”[12] This produced anti-ideological, antirational paradoxes like “national syndicalism” and “national socialism.” “Left” Fascists and Nazis were purged as their parties gained power and cozied up to the economic elite, but the nationalist co-optation of the rhetoric of working-class populism played a key role in getting them there.
The Nazis created their own labor exchanges to provide jobs to the unemployed based on their good relations with businessmen. In some ways, this was a class-collaborationist variation on the role of the union as a gateway toward employment in an industry. Nazi Storm Trooper taverns clearly grew out of the tradition of socialist taverns dating back to the nineteenth century.
The Nazis also provided free food and shelter for supporters amid the Great Depression. This was a marked departure from traditional conservatives who showed disdain for the poor and unemployed and at most contributed occasionally to apolitical or religious charities.
This model of far-right political charity has been adopted by the Greek Golden Dawn, the Italian CasaPound, the Hogar Social Madrid, and the British National Action, all of whom have started giving out free food and groceries to ethnic Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, and “whites” only. CasaPound activists started imitating autonomous squatters by occupying abandoned buildings, and Hogar Social Madrid not only started squatting but even on occasion organizing against the eviction of ethnic Spaniards in a clear attempt to capitalize on Spain’s vibrant left-wing housing-rights movement.
More broadly, postwar fascists continued to turn to the revolutionary Left for strategic insights. The “Third Position” fascists sought to apply Maoist theories of third-world revolution, to the goal of “European liberation,” which would entail forcibly removing “non-Europeans.” In the 1980s, a faction of French Troisième Voie (Third Way) sought to use “a ‘Trotskyist’ strategy” to burrow into the Front National in order to take it over from within. Ukrainian fascists have sought to appropriate the legacy of the Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, while the Spanish fascist Bases Autónomas lauded the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti.[13]
Starting in the late 1980s and early ’90s, though gaining force in the late 2000s, fascists across Europe have even started to copy the black bloc tactic of the German Autonomen. These black-clad “Autonomous Nationalists,” who sometimes use the anti-fascist flags logo with national socialist slogans or wear Palestinian kaffiyehs, have attempted to mimic the appeal of the radical Left by championing anticapitalism, antimilitarism, and anti-Zionism in Germany, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, England, Romania, Sweden, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. This tendency started to decline in Western Europe around 2013. “National-Anarchism” is another new variation on this theme. “National-Anarchists” abuse the anarchist concept of autonomy to argue for separate, homogenous “ethnic enclaves,” including a whites-only homeland.[14]
Many more examples could be cited, but these are sufficient to demonstrate how anti-fascism is not only about venturing outward to oppose fascism but also about guarding Against the Fascist Creep, as the title of Alexander Reid Ross’s marvelous work suggests. They also demonstrate the importance of left ideology. Without establishing how they fit together, concepts like “autonomy,” “national liberation,” or even “socialism,” and tactics like squatting, organizing food drives, or forming black blocs, can be co-opted under our noses.
5. It doesn’t take that many fascists to make fascism.
In 1919 Mussolini’s fasci had a hundred members. When Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922 only about 7 to 8 percent of the Italian population, and only thirty-five of the more than five hundred members of parliament, belonged to his PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista). The German Workers’ Party only had fifty-four members when Hitler attended his first meeting after the First World War. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, only about 1.3 percent of the population belonged to the NSDAP (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[15]369 Across Europe, massive fascist parties emerged out of what were initially small nuclei during the interwar period. More recently, the electoral success of many previously miniscule fascist(ic) parties after the financial crisis of 2008, and the recent wave of migration, has demonstrated the potential for rapid far-right growth when circumstances become favorable.
Certainly these parties grew, and these regimes consolidated their power, by winning the support of conservative elites, anxious industrialists, alienated small-business owners, unemployed nationalists, and others. Triumphant postwar resistance narratives may have denied that any but the most committed fascist ideologues supported figures like Mussolini or Hitler, but in fact both regimes managed to cultivate broad popular support, thereby blurring our understanding of what it meant to be a Fascist or a Nazi in the 1930s. In that sense, it took quite a few fascists to make fascism. The point being made here, however, is that before they achieved such popular support, Fascists and Nazis were but tiny groups of ideologues.
But meanwhile, it’s important to note that, as Mussolini assembled a rag-tag group of a hundred bitter veterans and quirky nationalistic socialists, and Hitler fought for leadership of the tiny German Workers’ Party, Italy and Germany were seemingly on the verge of social revolution. There was no reason for the Left to have batted an eye at either development. These tiny groups could not have been more irrelevant.
Given what anarchists, communists, and socialists knew at the time, there is no reason for them to have devoted any time or attention to the early days of fascism. Yet, one cannot help but wonder what might have happened if they had. This is an impossible counterfactual to address seriously, and dwelling on it excessively omits the larger societal factors that set the stage for the rise of fascism. Nevertheless, anti-fascists have concluded that since the future is unwritten, and fascism often emerges out of small, marginal groups, every fascist or white-supremacist group should be treated as if they could be Mussolini’s one hundred fasci, or the fifty-four members of the German Workers’ Party that provided Hitler’s first stepping stone.
The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d’être is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past seventy years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know—and that’s a very good thing indeed.
[1] Alice Speri, “The FBI has quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement,” The Intercept, January 31, 2017: https: //theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigatedwhite-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/.
[2] Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Oakland: AK Press, 2017), 115.
[3] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), 197, 201.
[4] Keith Hodgson, Fighting Fascism: The British Left and the Rise of Fascism, 1919–36 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 51, 55.
[5] Ibid., 27, 36.
[6] Paula Sutter Fichtner, Historical Dictionary of Austria Second Edition (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009), 96–97.
[7] Matthew N. Lyons, “Calling them ‘alt-right’ helps us fight them,” threewayfight, Nov. 22, 2016: https://threewayfight.blogspot. com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html.
[8] Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War, 68–69; Julius Deutsch, Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, Gabriel Kuhn, ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2017).
[9] Hodgson, Fighting Fascism, 105–106, 138, 140, 160–161.
[10] Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War, 6.
[11] Ibid., 86.
[12] Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 151.
[13] Ibid., 163; Ross, Against the Fascist Creep, 89–90, 140–141, 170–172.
[14] “Les autonomes nationalistes en Allemagne” Reflexes, November 12, 2009: http://reflexes.samizdat.net/les-autonomes-nationalistes-enallemagne-mefiez-vous-des-imitations/; Maik Fielitz, “Militanter Neonazismus in Griechenland,” Antifaschistisches Infoblatt, March 13, 2016: https://www.antifainfoblatt.de/artikel/militanter-neonazismusgriechenland; Ross, Against the Fascist Creep, 217–229, 284.
[15] Payne, A History of Fascism, 151, 287; Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 24.