[A study of strategies that have shaped antifascist mobilizations
over the past century, offers lessons for thinking about an
“effective and long-term response to the loose coalition of forces
that we saw at the Capitol … [an] entanglement that we will continue
to see in the coming weeks and months.”]
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HISTORY LESSONS FOR ANTIFASCISTS  
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Helmut-Harry Loewen
February 20, 2023
CounterPunch
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_ A study of strategies that have shaped antifascist mobilizations
over the past century, offers lessons for thinking about an
“effective and long-term response to the loose coalition of forces
that we saw at the Capitol … [an] entanglement that we will continue
to see in the coming weeks and months.” _

, Photograph Source: Mark Ramsay – CC BY 2.0

 

In the dominant liberal political imaginary, fascist and far-right
movements are framed as problems of hate and extremism. [1] The global
extremism industry – a network of government ministries,
intelligence agencies, military and police forces, university research
centers, think tanks, media outlets, and government-oriented NGOs –
dutifully serves the ruling class by occluding liberalism’s
complicity with fascism by placing antifascist movements on an
extremism spectrum that also includes violent fascist formations, a
mystification aimed at policing the Left and criminalizing
antifascists. [2]

Given the tangle of distortions concerning how fascism is understood,
research-based information and analysis from radical and critical
perspectives are crucial for antifascist resistance. [3] Antifascist
histories and the lessons that can be drawn from past struggles have
been the focus of two recent U.S.-based academic projects. A
conference on “Anti-Fascism in the 21st Century,” hosted by
Hofstra University and organized to coincide with the centenary of the
March on Rome, brought together scholars and activists from the United
States, Canada, and Europe in early November 2022. [4] Also launched
at the same time,  The April Institute
[[link removed]] is a collective organized to
advance public knowledge about the long history of antifascism in the
United States. In stressing the importance of antifascist projects
informed by scholarship that excavates movement histories, this work
differs from much of the research in the field, whose narrow focus on
hate crime, terrorism, and ideologically-motivated violent extremism
(IMVE) deploys conceptual frameworks which shore up agendas set by the
state security apparatus but contribute little to an understanding of
the dynamics of fascism in crisis-riven capitalist societies. [5]

In noting the prevalence of distorted and shallow understandings of
fascism, the result of which is that “the public understanding of
contemporary fascist tendencies lacks the context of their deep
historical roots” such that “those engaged in resistance are
deprived of the insights gained by a long antifascist tradition,”
the Institute’s mandate reflects its antifascist activist
alignments: (i) “To promote a deeper understanding of the troubling
history of fascist movements in the United States and to cultivate our
ability to identify contemporary warning signs”; (ii) “To
recognize, communicate, and celebrate the rich tradition, creativity,
and success of antifascist organizing and cultural production in the
United States”; and (iii) “To consider the social and material
conditions that give rise to fascist movements as well as the ways we
can imagine, build, and sustain inclusive and democratic
communities.”.[6]

As part of its inaugural six-part series on “U.S. Fascism and
Antifascism: Past and Present,” the Institute organized panels
featuring prominent Marxist, anarchist, and progressive scholars
discussing the themes of “U.S. Fascism: Origins, Patterns and
Continuities” and “Antifascist Histories: Models for
Resistance.” [7] Its ambitious schedule of programming for 2023
[[link removed]] involves four research and
public education projects: (a) exhibitions on Black antifascism in the
wake of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia; a second on fascist
politics and antifascist resistance at the 2017 “Unite the Right”
rally in Charlottesville; and one on a mass-based antifascist league
during the 1930s; (b) promotion of new interdisciplinary scholarship;
(c) collaboration with secondary and post-secondary educators; and (d)
a variety of physical and digital memorialization projects.

A sense of the collective’s activist orientation can be gained from
the work of Anna Duensing [[link removed]], a
postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and an Institute
co-founder. In a presentation
[[link removed]] for the Activist
History Review, Duensing sketches an analytical model of
“strategies” used by antifascist activists to expose and oppose
fascism in its various iterations: aggressive white nationalist
scapegoating; systems of racial hierarchy and exclusion; a state
terror apparatus backed by elites and enforced by mob rule that
“blurs the lines between state actors and civilians”; conspiracist
Red-baiting during the Cold War; racial bigotry and antisemitism; and
“the playing-up of a revolutionary bogey-man on the left.”  For
each of the five strategies she offers an example:

EDUCATION: This entails “pursuit of the truth,” the production of
knowledge to understand the use and abuse of history for political
ends, and the extensive documentation and archiving of fascist
violence. In this regard Ida B. Wells’ truth-telling about racist
pogroms was crucial for the development of anti-lynching campaigns.

INTELLIGENCE: This involves the gathering and analysis of information
for exposure and public education campaigns. Duensing cites the work
of Stetson Kennedy, whose book _The Klan Unmasked _(1954) details
the clandestine operations he ran to undermine the KKK in the postwar
period.

MILITANCY: Against what Duensing calls “the liberal handwringing
over whether public demonstrations by fascists should be allowed,”
antifascists have adopted a broad repertoire of tactics, from public
demonstrations and deplatforming to community defense. An example of
the latter is the NAACP organizer, Robert F. Williams, whose
book _Negroes With Guns_ (1962) documents successful grassroots
campaigns of “counter-violence” against the North Carolina Klan.

COMMUNITY: Under this category Duensing refers to local care
practices and mutual aid projects organized “when the state has
failed” poor communities. The Black Panther Party’s delivery of
social programs (food distribution and medical services) and support
for cultural and education initiatives is an oft-cited example.

MOVEMENT-BUILDING: This refers to the “slow, methodical grassroots
work of organizing” at various scales, from workplaces, schools,
neighborhoods to broader campaigns. Duensing argues that the
“immense coalition-building capacities of antifascism” can
contribute to other Left movements. Her example is Ella Baker, who
understood the role of racism in fascism, imperialism, labor
exploitation, the oppression of women, and mass incarceration in her
five decades of political organizing.

A study of strategies that have shaped antifascist mobilizations over
the past century, offers lessons, according to Duensing, for thinking
about an “effective and long-term response to the loose coalition of
forces that we saw at the Capitol … [an] entanglement that we will
continue to see in the coming weeks and months.”

Learning from earlier examples of antifascist militancy can also
dispel myths surrounding contemporary approaches. While reactionary
politicians seek to criminalize antifascist activism as
‘extremism’ or ‘terrorism,’ and some progressive commentators
decry confrontational tactics, a study of past antifascist
mobilizations can serve to contextualize recent efforts to fight the
far right, thus disclosing lines of continuity throughout antifascist
history. The activists who stood against the coalition of neo-Nazis,
Klansmen, and heavily armed “patriot” groups in Charlottesville
engaged in “direct action used by people, rather than the state, to
confront racism at its violent points of irruption,” showing that it
is “courageous resistance in the streets that has responded to the
confusion we see all around us. While the forces of liberalism
counseled us to ignore an emboldened racist far right as so many
buffoons, others took on the responsibility of being the primary force
of confrontation, from the J20 actions in DC to Charlottesville.”
[8]

In his study of the roots of U.S. fascism, historian Gerald Horne (who
presented his research at an Institute panel) asks whether the
21st century will see extensions of fascism beyond its 19th and
20th century precursors. After documenting fascism’s U.S. roots in
the system of slavery, Indigenous genocide, settler colonialism,
imperialism, and Jim Crow apartheid, Horne concludes:

“Preliminary signs are not encouraging, and it is not simply because
the parallels with high fascism are so foreboding – genocide, mass
dispossession, demagogy, chauvinism, wars of aggression, religion
instrumentalized, runaway patriarchy, class collaboration especially
in the Pan-European community, and as a direct result labor subdued
along with its complement, the left-wing. Encouraging, however, is
that … resistance persists.” [9]

The fight against fascism continues. It is an intergenerational and
collective effort, one that requires clarity and courage. The April
Institute offers antifascists and the broader Left important resources
for this ongoing work.

NOTES.

[1] In discussing the “effacement of fascism in the liberal
political imaginary,” Gabriel Rockhill argues that an “epochal
conception of history,” which undergirds the notion that 
“there’s a risk that the nation-state would become fascistic, 
like France or the United States in the Trump Era,” is mistaken,
given that this overlooks “the fact that fascism and authoritarian
rule are integral to how liberal nation-states that are capitalistic
have always functioned.” He continues: “The way they [liberalism
and fascism] relate is as two modes of governance that I refer to as
the good cop/bad cop of capitalist rule. The two modes of governance
function in very close complicity with one another. They often will
toggle back and forth between them. For poor communities of color in
the United States it’s usually the fascistic authoritarian rule of
the prison-industrial-complex, but for whites – not understood as a
color but as a social economic category – they’re usually
subjected to liberal rule. … The risk is not that fascism will come
about. The reality is that it has always already been here. Liberals
have to train themselves to see its existence.” Transcribed excerpts
from a presentation by Gabriel Rockhill, “Toward a Counter-History
of French Theory: Understanding the Global Political Economy of
Ideas,” Critical Theory Workshop, Paris, July 15, 2019.

Online: [link removed]  See also
his “Liberalism & Fascism: The Good Cop and Bad Cop of
Capitalism.”
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[2] See Chamsy el-Ojeili and Dylan Taylor, “The Extremism Industry:
A Political Logic of Post-Hegemonic Liberalism,” _Critical
Sociology_  46: 7-8 (November 2020), 1141-1155. The authors,
sociologists based in New Zealand/Aotearoa, argue that political
forces designated as ‘extreme’ are characterizations that “serve
to mystify their targets while simultaneously legitimating established
political elites.” Noting the “extraordinary ascension of
‘extremism’ over the last couple of decades,” they show that the
“intellectual production of the extremism industry” is based on a
“’rough consensus’ … on who we are speaking of when we speak
of ‘extremists’: Islamists, activists from outside of the
established parties of the political Left and Right, animal
liberationists, extra-parliamentary environmental radicals, the
militants of Antifa, for instance.”

[3] For example, CounterPunch continues to serve as an indispensable
archive of antifascist interventions with its publication of
commentators such as Carl Boggs
[[link removed]], Anthony DiMaggio
[[link removed]], Henry A.
Giroux [[link removed]], Thomas
Klikauer
[[link removed]], Vicente
Navarro [[link removed]], Eve
Ottenberg
[[link removed]], Gabriel
Rockhill [[link removed]], Paul
Street [[link removed]], and others
[[link removed]].

[4] The schedule and twenty-eight videos of conference presentations
are available
online: [link removed]

[5] The British antifascist campaigner Liz Fekete has argued that an
“antifascist lens” makes visible the “pattern of collusion,
direct or indirect, between the military, police and the intelligence
services” with far-right movements: “Fascism does not hatch eggs
only on the margins of society; it breeds within authoritarian
structures, within those spaces most shielded from public scrutiny,
such as the police and intelligence services, which provide the
perfect incubators.” She concludes that the “counter-extremism
industry … in treating left resistance to this political violence as
just another form of extremism, is making it easier for states to
criminalise anti-fascists.” See Liz Fekete, _Europe’s Fault
Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right_  (London & New York: Verso,
2018), 49, 50.

[6] The name chosen for The April Institute is apt on a number of
levels. April 1945 witnessed the liberation of Nazi concentration
camps, marked the victory of the Resistance in Northern Italy, and saw
the suicide of Hitler and the summary execution of Mussolini. Its
likely etymological root in the Latin verb _aperiō _(to disclose,
uncover) points to the work of unearthing antifascist histories to
guide political mobilizations against contemporary
fascism. [link removed]

[7] Available on YouTube: [link removed]

[8] Anonymous, “An Open Letter to Cornel West: On
Charlottesville,” _The Philosophical Salon,  _September 2017:
Available
online: [link removed]

[9] Gerald Horne, _The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery &
Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism _ (New York: International
Publishers, 2022), 569-570.

_Helmut-Harry Loewen has organized and participated in antifascist
projects in Western Canada for over three decades. He is retired from
the University of Winnipeg (criminology and sociology) and currently
serves as an Associate
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the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He can be
reached at: [email protected]_

* Anti-Fascism
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* Fascism
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* Charlottesville
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