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Portland Anti-Fascist Archives Project 2.0

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Centenary of the Arditi Del Popolo 1921–2021. Coalition for Human Dignity activists had one foot in militant anti-fascism and another in the struggle for a Third Reconstruction.

From “The Matrix” to “The Shop”.

“The Matrix” collective at 333 SE 3rd Street in Portland, Oregon.

“Back in the late 1980s, in the embryonic days of the Coalition for Human Dignity, together with a small group of student radicals I cobbled together something called the Antifascist Archives Project. It amounted to little more than a poster featuring a bundle of sticks with the blade of an axe protruding from the top being broken in half. The symbol is that of the fasces, the Latin term from which fascism derives. We pulled our logo from the militant Italian anti-fascist movement of the 1920s, the Arditi Del Popolo. Together with our fanatic hearts and a pile of research files to inspire the breaking, we began ferreting out fascists wherever they might be, in whatever stage of development they had progressed, at whatever cost to ourselves. We operated from the second floor of a warehouse space located at 333 SE 3rd Street in Portland, Oregon known as “The Matrix.” From the beginning, my antifascism always involved no small amount of rebellion.

Below our second-story ramshackle office was a tortilla chip factory where (in my mind’s olfactory eye) I can still smell those fresh tortillas cooking. After being cut into chips, they would slowly make their way down a small conveyor belt where they would be bagged and often consumed, hot and fresh, by yours truly. My memories of this collective space are bound up with the smell of those tortilla chips and that of another: the fresh ink that emanated from the giant offset printing press which periodically disgorged finished broadsheets for distribution by wild-eyed radicals such as myself.”–—Back to Little Beirut.

“The Matrix” housed many radical political groups, but frequent armed attacks by neo-Nazis throughout 1990-91 had anti-fascists patrolling with rifles from the rooftop. The only entrance to our offices on the second floor was through a steel-reinforced door on a warehouse loading dock. This afforded us some protection. Regardless, our presence endangered activists not accustomed to facing down boneheads. We had to relocate.

“The Shop” in NE Portland at the North Coast Seed Studios building. CHD moved there around February, 1991 and made it our home until 1997.

“In winter the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest wind finds its way through split bricks and cracked beams. It is fended off with wood stove and blankets, occasionally the warmth of a kindred spirit. From my office in this ramshackle warehouse, set next to a railroad crossing busy with jostling container cars and the occasional furtive hobo, surrounded by artists, counterculture types, and a few working-class intellectuals (some of whom work at Powell’s Books, a temple for what remains of the graphosphere) I engage in my phantom labor: interrogating the past so as to excavate the future.” —The Trumpen Proletariat Goes to Mars.

Comrades who have been following the “It Did Happen Here” Podcast and KBOO Radio show (https://kboo.fm/program/it-did-happen-here) know that there was a network of anti-racist groups that fought the far-right in the Pacific Northwest (especially Portland, Oregon) from 1988 into the early 2000s. I was a founding member and sometime staffer for the one of the groups profiled, the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD). CHD was known for cutting-edge research and intelligence that targeted the far-right, together with grassroots community defense efforts. For about ten-years comrades and I waded through newspaper clippings, files, primary documents, databases, videotapes, books and cassette tapes with an eye toward operationalizing our findings. Put another way: Unlike most academics, who often craft elaborate postmortems on this or that element of the far-right, comrades with the Coalition for Human Dignity created our own “facts on the ground.” CHD activists didn’t collect data for posterity; we gathered intelligence to attack the far-right and fascists. In many ways, we were more effective at this than any of our contemporaries.

We also made mistakes, some of which will become apparent throughout these archival posts. That said, beware critics who either knowingly or naïvely wring their hands about this or that tactic wielded by comrades in the fight against the far-right. Too often they forget (if they ever knew) that the far-right and fascism are always present within the United States body politic; regardless of what stage of development such bigoted movements may be in, they must be fought using methodologies unique to those threats. Remember: fighting fascism means fighting fascists.

Today, the far-right and fascist threat is worse than at any time in my 54 years, so too the need to fight back. Trump’s ignominious departure from the White House should provide only cold comfort; the social base and political economy of fascism remain intact.

I offer this archival material so that we might compare and contrast methodologies for fighting the far-right and fascists and thereby improve our fighting capacity. Obviously, the information ecology during the 1980s-1990s was in many ways quite different from that of today — slower, less complex, more centralized, labor intensive, and analog, or pre-digital. I have long argued that the formation of “The Shop” as the intelligence wing of the Coalition for Human Dignity was necessary in order to obtain a comprehensive overview of various far-right formations then active throughout the Pacific Northwest. That overview could not be achieved without the labor-intensive work carried out by staffers and volunteers in the research wing of CHD. It was absolutely essential. In order to aid communities under attack by the far-right — in real-time — one had to operationalize research. One could not possibly coordinate efforts to fight the far-right and defend communities without the most up-to-date research and intelligence. Journalists couldn’t do it, cops were a part of it, politicians were afraid of it and academics were too busy with their post-mortems. At that time there was only one way to do it: “The Shop.”

Some of the archival material I will be posting here I’ve managed to preserve, some I’ve more recently dug up. I left the CHD around 1999 after having transferred the many filing cabinets, videos, databases, and a highly specialized library, to offices in Seattle. Sometime thereafter the group imploded but not before sending the CHD files to a kindred organization in Chicago called the Center for New Community, which also collapsed. Somewhere in these transitions the CHD files were lost or stolen; the activists who are responsible for this shocking neglect of basic movement security and respect for research deserve to be met with the harshest of criticism. You know who you are, and you should be held accountable. Anti-fascists with integrity should revisit this sordid chapter in our history, if for no other reason so as to prevent perhaps some of the same people from doing it again. And again. What happened to the files?

“The Shop” refers to the semi-secret office space maintained by CHD for about six years through a sub-lease from two professional photographers. Thanks to their generosity we were able to file our reports, stuff our filing cabinets, organize our databases, and destabilize and destroy organized bigots. The boneheads never found us, either.

CHD researchers set out to create a hybrid of library science and spycraft to fight the far-right menace. We had some limited success, for a time.

For all those older anti-fascists who have continued doing salt-of-the-earth work, I commend you and offer my sincere appreciation and support. Younger anti-fascists today operate with a sophistication, breadth and effectiveness we could only dream of. Groups like Rose City Antifa and the Pacific Northwest Anti-fascist Workers Collective continue the anti-fascist tradition. But they also face a far more dangerous menace. They need our unwavering support.

As I am no longer technically literate in any 21st-century sense, please excuse in advance what are sure to be many frustrating oversights and discombobulations. If you dig or ask me questions, I’ll do my best to clarify.

In Solidarity—Jonathan.

Allen’s Press Clipping Bureau (Established 1888!)

Sample clippings from Allen’s Press Clipping Bureau.

Allen’s Press Clipping Bureau was an important addition to CHD’s toolbox. Allen’s clipped articles from hundreds of newspapers across the Pacific Northwest according to keywords we provided like “racism”, “Measure 9”, and “white supremacist” then stuffed them into envelopes and mailed them to us. We would index these articles according to names, organizations and issues, then enter that information into databases that linked to the clippings, which were in turn photocopied and stored in wire-frame, legal size folders that hung inside Hon brand filing cabinets. Always Hon, always legal size (rather than letter) because there’s nothing like getting 8 1/2 x 14 size documents and trying to fit them in 8 1/2 x 11 folders—it just doesn’t work. This process was expensive and time consuming. Today, such information is generally available to anyone with a cell phone and a search engine. But not then. Did I mention it was expensive? Also, if you try Googling “David Irving 1992 Portland, Oregon” you won’t find much. Like so much of our work it was pre-internet, and has been buried. Let’s dig it up.

END

Bookchin, Cockburn and Libertarianism.

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8.22.20

Anarchists are often at their best when they critique communists for unhealthy admiration of order and authority. This tradition is captured in the term of abuse “tankie”, which is anarchist shorthand for a communist who does not shy from bringing out the tanks to crush rebellion, like those deployed during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 in then Czechoslovakia. Murray Bookchin, a social ecologist, and philosopher of libertarian municipalism whose writings continue to animate leftists from Rojava to Seattle, often wrote with a profound contempt for the more authoritarian traditions found in various expressions of Marxism and socialism. If he were alive today, he would not be a “tankie”. As an anarcho-communist, I am sympathetic to many of his views. For instance, the quote below is an effective broadside against the kind of Marxism that needs cops, commissars, and soldiers to keep everyone in line.

 

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That’s great stuff. But there is another Murray Bookchin, a writer who, for whatever misbegotten reason, was a featured speaker at the 1978 national convention of the Libertarian Party USA in Boston, Massachusetts. The following year the party nominated the billionaire David H. Koch for Vice President. You can look up Bookchin’s presentation online. It is not his finest hour. He also contributed this to a right-wing journal.

“There was a period of time, indubitably, in Jefferson’s time, when the farmer, the yeoman—the American yeoman, standing on his land with his musket—represented a forward step for individuality. But today the millions that flow in and out of New York anonymously, through mass transportation, through the tunnels and over the bridges that lead into and out of the suburbs—these are among the most de-individualized people I’ve encountered in 57 years of living. Most of them are organization men and women and have become denuded of all personality and uniqueness. They’re figments; they’re creatures, in fact. They’re creatures of the mass media and of the corporate world that has rendered them totally homogenized and anonymous. Now already the attempt to preserve what we in America would call private property, the rights of US Steel and the rights of General Motors, has become literally a step in the direction of the de-individualization of the American people and their reduction to masses.” (Interview with Murray Bookchin Reason Magazine 1979.)

I have long maintained that libertarianism in the United States constitutes a deep reservoir of reaction completely antithetical to anti-fascist praxis. Together with Christian nationalism, American libertarianism functions as a political pipeline that transports the raw material of white reaction to the toxic refineries of 21st-century fascism. It has always had its center of gravity in the American South, where fetishes for private property and “individual liberty” run through so-called “states rights.” The entire philosophy and praxis of libertarianism are anathema to revolutionary anti-fascism. There is no bargaining with it, cozying up to it, or riding alongside it that doesn’t involve the wholesale betrayal of our principles.

Fuck libertarians.

That yeoman farmer was also a white settler, a slaveholder, a nascent bourgeois individualist, and a colonialist monster. This abstract individual is favorably contrasted with a de-individualized, homogenized, and anonymous “creature.” This contrast between the agrarian individual and the urban masses –New Yorkers in particular — between the inherent worth of the individual and the mind-numbing, worthlessness of the masses is not a part of any anarchist tradition I am very fond of. In fact, I find it repulsive. I am familiar enough with Bookchin’s later work, when he attempted reconciliation between Marxism and anarchism, to know this is not representative of his entire corpus. Perhaps he clarified such comments elsewhere? In any case, I think efforts on the part of leftists to find “common ground” with organized libertarianism are at best misguided and at worst potentially fatal to our revolution. Our time is better spent reconciling anarchism and communism, a project I think possible and worthwhile.

My problem with Bookchin is similar to my problem(s) with the late Alexander Cockburn. While Louis Proyect, the “Unrepentant Marxist” has posthumously conferred upon him secular sainthood, I’m less inclined to exalt Cockburn. His frequent attacks on the anti-racist liberal/left are now a matter of historical record; so too his veneration of the tea party as a welcome riposte to liberal identity politics. But he was blind in the white eye; he couldn’t see the bigotry at the heart of the Tea Party as anything other than unfortunate, and irrelevant, a holdover from another era. How wrong he was. As someone once noted: The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.

One can find much in the vast body of work of Bookchin and Cockburn that is important to uphold today; there’s also a great deal there that was crap in the 1980s and 1990s and has only gotten stinkier with time. Had he lived to see the election of Trump in 2016 to the U.S. presidency, can anyone seriously doubt where Cockburn would now stand on the so-called ‘populist right’? I’m pretty sure that his anti-anti-racism and warm feelings for the so-called right-wing populists of the Tea Party era would have propelled him to make arguments similar to those now being made by Crystal Ball and Glenn Greenwald about the desirability of a right-left realignment across “populist” lines. That’s a fool’s errand.

Cockburn and his ilk could not grasp racism as anything other than labor market competition and a cynical ploy foisted on the white working class by clever elites. But racism has always been more than that, and always at the center of ruling class command and control in the United States, a structural feature of American capitalism and empire. It is a fundamental pillar of inequality, not a vestige of a bygone era.

All socialists, anarchists, and communists, whether of the “tankie” or “insurrectionist” varieties, are simultaneously anti-racists and anti-fascists; or should be. Any fundamental, lasting, and desirable change must run through Black liberation. That’s partly why we chant, “Black Lives Matter!” The other reason being, of course, that for so many people, Black lives so obviously matter so little, if at all.

END

When Ghosts Dream Of Angels—Part One

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As a ghost sent from the past into your world my presence involves no small amount of incivility. So much clanging about and reckless rage, while confined to dark digital outposts, still demands an audience, someone to haunt. In any case, it has never been your world, or our world, always their world. We were just thrust into it, and told to make our way, however difficult. So if my desperate whispers fall on your ears as so many dark forebodings, they also contain within them the possibility of another future.

Can a ghost dream? If so, what kind of dream would a ghost dream? It would be a dream filled with longing and regret, to be sure, but also, free from the past, a dream of reckless abandon, an imagination allowed to run riot. It is a dream that cries for a future free from an insufferable past and an intolerable present.

In this, the dream I dream is not unlike that cool and sardonic description of heaven as told by the character Belize to a fictionalized Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Twenty-five years after its first production the play is experiencing a welcome revival, no doubt because of scenes like this one:

 

 

I’ve taken the liberty to transcribe HBO’s version of Kushner’s play. Please pardon in advance my light editing and any errors.

Belize: “You awake? Can you see who I am?”

Roy Cohn: “Yeah. You came for my momma years ago. Wrap your arms around me now…”

Belize: “Who am I, Roy?”

Roy Cohn: (laughs) “The negro night nurse. My negation. Come to escort me to the underworld…”

Belize: “You want me Roy? You want me to take you away?”

Roy Cohn: “Oh, God I’m ready.”

Belize: “I’ll be coming for you soon. Everything I want is in the end of you.”

Roy Cohn:  “What’s it like after…this misery ends?”

Belize: “Hell or Heaven?”

Roy Cohn: He….(Roy trails off)

Belize: “Like San Francisco.”

Roy Cohn: “A City! Good. I was worried it would be a garden. I hate that shit.”

Belize: “Hmm. Big City. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catacorner to that. Windows missing in every edifice, like broken teeth. Gritty wind and a gray high sky full of ravens.

Roy Cohn: “Isaiah.”

Belize: “The prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary, like rubies and obsidion, and diamond colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages and big dance palaces full of music, lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto. Brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there. ”

Roy Cohn: “And heaven?”

Belize: “That was heaven, Roy.”

Indeed. Yet as Kushner has acknowledged, many years after publishing Angels, that future is not here, in San Francisco or anywhere else. Besides, even our most beautiful rebels, like Belize, are still, at best, changing the bedpans of the Roy Cohns of the world, rather than topping off that dose of morphine. Heaven must be conquered, brought into being, rather than received as a gift, upon surrender.

In order to dream a future at odds with the only one our present has on offer (the doctrine of TINA) one must identify who and what stand in the way of the realization of that future–one has to theorize an enemy, then a way to defeat that enemy. Kushner’s character Belize does this, and yet seems a bit too secure (smug even) in the notion that his heaven is the future.

Part of the problem, I think, is that smugness exhibited by Belize, so often on display by today’s liberals (think Rachel Maddow) and not a few historical materialists (Perry Anderson), reflects a belief that history is a necessary evolution, a slow but certain unfolding of ‘progress’, an arc always ‘bending’ towards justice. It is not. It just moves, hither and yon, not backwards or forwards. Where it moves and the quality of that movement is at least in part up to us. We may not make it move within conditions of our choosing, but move it we must.

Dreaming is a precondition for liberation; an essential rupture with ‘what is’, a reimagining of what is possible and and a fierce interrogation of ‘progress’. It is also essential for an effective anti-fascism.

In 1940, in the midst of a world-wide fascist explosion, just prior his suicide, Walter Benjamin said as much. From Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, Thesis Nine:

“There is a painting by [Paul] Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

All of our 21st century gizmos and widgets, all that seamless connectivity and disruptive productivity brought on by our gigantic mega corporations are entirely compatible with a neo-fascism now only in its pre-pubescent stage. Fascism is not the reemergence of some ancient bigotry from prehistory, it is one possible future asserting itself, and in this assertion another form of capitalism is being constituted. Behind the progress of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk is a craven figure who cringes and obeys for a piece of chocolate. That figure is us, unless we discover a way to bring about a rupture with that ‘progress’.

In an article on Benjamin’s eclectic anarcho-communism in Jacobin  (“The Young Benjamin”, Jacobin Blog, January 8, 2016)  Michael Löwy locates the failure to apprehend fascism within the evolutionary socialist tradition represented by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Löwy writes:

“An evolutionist conception of history, which believes in the necessary progress in the forms of domination, can hardly give an account of fascism — except as an unexplainable parenthesis, an incomprehensible regression ‘in the middle of the 20th Century.’ Now, as Benjamin wrote in his Theses, one cannot understand the meaning of fascism if one considers it just an exception to the historical norm which would be progress.”

Lowy notes that “Benjamin understood the 20th century as one of barbarism and modernity — an interconnection which would take, a few years after his death, the catastrophic figure of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”

War is coming; and with it the soil within which fascism grows is fertilized.

END

 

 

 

 

 

Antifa Spycraft

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

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Antifa Emblem

I probably cut an odd figure in my Carhartt Washed-Duck Tool Pants, black Thrasher hoodie and industrial neoprene gloves. Waist-deep in a dumpster I am making a fashion statement of sorts, wading through the quotidian refuse of an office park: coffee grinds, fast food containers, styrofoam peanuts, cardboard boxes, used printer cartridges and, much to my chagrin, the occasional dirty diaper. It’s 1990 and my comrades and I are ‘dumpster diving’ out in the suburban sprawl of Portland, Oregon. But it is neither food nor salable commodities we seek. We are churning through garbage in search of the political droppings of a far right organization housed there. The take from this ‘trash cover’ (to use a term of the trade) could help neutralize a far-right group, or at least make less effective their attacks on vulnerable communities. After a few night’s worth of applied garbology–Disco! Reams of perforated computer paper reveal detailed membership lists. We don’t have time to do anything other than scan it–the headings confirm it is from our target–so we bag the loot and skidaddle.

Your trash, my treasure–asshole.

From there the black garbage bags are transported to a warehouse where the really difficult slog begins. We spread out a large tarpaulin and separate the wheat from the chaff. What we call raw, primary data–everything from membership rosters to post-it notes, utility bills to grocery lists–is sorted and prepped so as to be of some use. Then we feed the raw data into already existing databases and files, cross referencing it to identify matches and points for further analysis. In other words, manual data entry is how we transformed data into information (no shortcuts from analog to digital back then). If we do our opposition research well, that information can reach its final form: actionable intelligence. For instance, the computer printouts provide detailed information on the targeted organization’s supporters–donation amounts, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, etc. Some of those donors may not want their identities released to the public. We do. Likewise, the discovery of internal memoranda can provide a window into a group’s organizational capabilities, relations with other political formations or even internal dynamics, such as factional fights, that we can exploit. Finally, a report can be generated and the findings ready for dissemination. Then it’s back into the dumpsters and the process repeats itself. From data collection to information analysis to actionable intelligence.

Our fashion statement is also therefore a political statement.

In all of this our team of researchers were practicing a form of ‘para politics’, i.e., political conduct apart from voting or demonstrating, polling or political speech. There are other, less charitable meanings associated with this term, but I am employing it here in a relatively value neutral manner. This is, of course, the province of the Antifa. For our purposes here, let’s call it Antifa spycraft.

If my late-night shenanigans of decades past often yielded material for critical print, radio and television stories on the far right, they also often helped communities better protect themselves from attack. In this case, our information helped ‘out’ more than a few ‘down low’ bigoted businesses and politicians. Oh, and it was legal. In many locales, the laws around trash collection are often ambiguous. In this case, because the material we absconded with was in a dumpster, it was no longer private property. Likewise, depending on your locale, once your garbage can is out on a sidewalk or street, it may be free for anti-fascists–or fascists, for that matter–to rummage through. This low tech tactic of opposition research–today’s equivalent of hacking someone’s digital footprint–was a time-honored weapon in the Antifa arsenal. But not the only weapon.

If back in the day we had a ‘trash cover’ on an enemy political group, there was a good chance we also had an infiltrator attending meetings and other activists taking down license plates and shooting video and photos of their events. Much like the shitheads at Project Veritas and Brietbart News do now, but long before those clowns were selling their hack jobs to their paymasters, we pushed the limits of acceptable political engagement. Today, effective anti-fascists, especially those grouped around Rose City Antifa and It’s Going Down, as well as activists featured in Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook understand this. It’s well past time to have a debate with those socialists and other radicals who don’t seem to get it.

That the political tradition and contemporary efforts of the Antifa are valuable, even essential, to the broader socialist struggle is not accepted by all comrades. In spite of an honorable and effective history, there are left radicals who not only dismiss this work, but denigrate those who practice it. Quite a few regard the most militant and therefore visible actions of the Antifa as anathema to our broader struggle. Many misguided socialists prefer to ignore this vital work or, when such intelligence is used by an Antifa fighting force, such as in Charlottesville, raise cries of ‘adventurism’, perhaps laced with a quote from Lenin on infantile disorders.

But if you ask this old ghost there is nothing more infantile than attacking the work of comrades you know next to nothing about; except, perhaps, doing so from a Marxist theoretical framework so sclerotic it can regurgitate that fatal stupidity all veteran anti-fascists are familiar with: “The enemy is not fascism as much as it is capitalism that exploits the working class according to democratic and civilized norms that would never be associated with the swastika or other fascist regalia.” (‘Antifa and the Perils of Adventurism” by Louis Proyect, August 15, 2017. My emphasis). Proyect, whose nom-de-chair is The Unrepentant Marxist, slanders antifa activists when he’s not busy digging himself out from under all the free dvds (he never tires of letting us know) tinseltown sends him for film reviews.

He goes lowest when addressing the street battles between anti-racists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlotesville last year.

He writes, “Turning now to Charlottesville, it is obvious to me that if the protests had been disciplined and under the control of marshals such as was the norm during the Vietnam antiwar movement, there would have been much less of a chance that James Fields would have been able to drive his Dodge Challenger into a crowd, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.”

Here Proyect is laying the death of Heather Heyer at the feet of the Antifa, instead of where it belongs, with the neo-Nazi who ran her over. Elsewhere he refers to Antifa activists as ‘boys’ engaging in ‘childish acting out’. And unruly boys need discipline, don’t they? Proyect apparently wants cops, in the form of movement ‘marshals’, to get them back in line, with a spanking, if necessary. This bit of scolding he digs up from his glory days in the abject failure that was the Vietnam antiwar movement. But the important lesson of Charlottesville is completely lost to Proyect, which is in the role the Antifa played in protecting religious pacifists from attack. Cornel West testified to this development, something that should be built upon. Leftists with integrity, who know when to shut the fuck up when they are out of their element of expertise, should support the Antifa, not hang them out to dry.

What Proyect does not understand is twofold: the nature of neo-fascism in the 21st Century and how a corresponding anti-fascism, to be effective, must be somewhat different from other forms of protest and organizing.

By definition Antifa organizing must contend with vigilante forms of attack–those that have their origins largely outside the state repressive aparatus. In other words, fighting racist assholes is not the same as going door-to-door collecting signatures for a ballot initiative or candidate, much less reviewing the latest art house cinema production.

The hinge that supports the door through which all revolutionary antifascists must pass–from a coherent definition of fascism to a retooling of anti-fascism–is intelligence, by which I mean spycraft. There is no substitute for knowing your enemy, preferably much better than they know themselves. No one else will do it. Cops reduce everything to their bailiwick: criminality. Reporters personalize the far right, always looking to sell a story. Academics do post-mortems with an eye towards predictability–usually unconnected with the flesh and blood Antifa struggle and therefore too little, too late. Liberals wring their hands about free speech and fumble about for that phantom limb within the democratic party that might deliver them from ‘hate’. Anti-fascists are the only political force intent on destroying both the conditions that continually regenerate fascism as well as the recurrence of the fascist plague itself.

This role can only be successfully carried out by anti-fascists who employ measures of antifa spycraft against our enemies. One cannot gain this critical advantage through anything other than counter-intelligence: no amount of long-form analyses of the falling rate of profit or the changing demographics of the working class will tell you this and it cannot be divined through oracles–whether in the form of tea leaves or data science. Anti-fascists must have the ability to infiltrate neo-fascists both to disrupt and neutralize their efforts and to protect communities they attack.

How to do this begins with a counterintuitive hidden in plain view. The state, law enforcement in particular, is governed by a set of regulations that are not the same as those that govern citizens and many others. People can engage in intelligence gathering in ways that are often (though not always) rendered problematic for a cop or official. Furthermore, the person of interest to an antifa spy is often not a public official but a private citizen, perhaps a public figure, in many ways more open to surveillance and their networks thereby to penetration. This also applies to the civic and political groups a far right activist works with. While it may be quite beyond the technical capability of an antifa activist to hack the confidential informant records of a local cop, it is certainly within their capability to wade through the trash of a local fascist.

Today, many Antifa groups continue in this same tradition with detailed, publicly available and actionable intelligence on far-right activists–mug shots, addresses, workplaces, quotations, etc. Furthermore, contrary to claims that it’s too expensive and/or complicated to practice spycraft (leave it to the professionals!?) amateur spies are essential to the Antifa. Another way to think about this is that the type of struggle the Antifa is engaged in will in large part determine its methods, much like clinic defense organizations have long utilized opposition researchers in their work defending clinics against the anti-abortion movement, especially when they cannot rely on the state to do so.

It should be obvious that fighting the far-right is not the same as fighing corporations or the state; and the Antifa is not synonymous with the Black Bloc, another elementary distinction that eludes Proyect, but will have to wait for another time.

To continue, a cop generally has to have ‘probable cause’ to search through someone’s garbage and will likely be required to leave a paper trail (digital footprint) of their activity. In other words, because of the oppositional nature of much of the far right–the fact that it occupies a contradictory relationship with the state, often outside of it and even opposed to it–forms of anti-fascist resistance can penetrate it by different means. Opportunities for disrupting the far right present themselves in ways that organizing a union drive at a multinational corporate factory do not, and, also, that creative intelligence work can provide the basis for work between communities that might not otherwise work together. This doesn’t, of course, mean that elements of the state don’t overlap with the far right (after all, Donald Trump is president) but that anti-fascists need to take the threat of their activism seriously.

In my experience the value of anti-fascist work was always best determined in close consultation with other radical groups and communities targeted by the far right. In “Death to the Klan” and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US (It’s Going Down, July 26, 2016) there is a useful review of such efforts in Portland, Oregon during the late 1980s and 1990s.

“…[groups] like the Red and Anarchist SkinHeads (RASH) and the SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPs) found themselves in frequent battles with neo-fascists converging on Portland. A group called Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) activated not just to beat back the onslaught of skinheads, but to transform racial consciousness in Portland. They used the strategies developed by ARA [Anti Racist Action] to expose and shame skinheads wherever they showed their faces, getting them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments. However, when skinheads began to harass local members of the community, attacking their houses and cars, CHD devised a decentralized community self-defense strategy.”

In the same article an old Portland comrade of mine, M. Treloar, is interviewed by It’s Going Down activists and elaborates:

“There were several situations where our people who had concealed weapons were confronted by groups of boneheads and either pulled the weapon or made it clear that they were armed and the boneheads backed off…There is no doubt in my mind that in several instances they would have been attacked, since we had people who were taking down car license plate numbers, staking out houses or infiltrating gatherings.”

“The CHD mobilized to form a media defense position, which helped generate positive public opinion….What’s notable is again the people who attacked the boneheads after a certain point did very little time, and were generally hailed as heroes in the community…”

From very early on the work of the Coalition for Human Dignity in Portland, Oregon (I was a founding member) targeted the social base of neo-fascism: white nationalism and the Christian Right. This definition intentionally cut across class lines–rendering racist reaction as neither the exclusive rotted fruit of the ruling class (capitalism releasing fascist antibodies to protect itself) nor principally the unresolved grievances of a white working class left behind by captialist development (two fairly typical myopic explanations of the re-emergence of the far-right.)

Back then, much as today, the issues of choice for far-rightists were anti-black and anti-latino racism and homophobia. It should be noted that at this time (1980s-1990s) the two main political parties and all statist anti-hate groups (SPLC, ADL, etc.), scrupulously avoided homophobia as a political issue and did not include bigoted elements of the Christian right nor anti-immigrant groups within their definition of ‘hate groups’. It was radical LGBTQ and fight-the-right activists who pushed them to do so by being more effective than they ever could be. But, nonetheless, organizing in the early nineties had to contend with the routine dismissals of the Christian Right as backwoods hicks, neo-Nazis as cults and criminals and racist skinheads as yet another counter-cultural youth rebellion, all destined to pass–if they hadn’t already–into the dustbin of history. But they didn’t, and neither did we. So many premature obituaries of the Paleo-conservatives and the Christian Right have been issued and reissued since then that it is staggering to consider not only their continued relevance today but their central role in the Trump electoral victory, and how spectacularly wrong those analysts were about their political prospects.

Many months after Trump’s victory, in a series of articles for Catalyst, Jacobin and New Left Review one of the most astute Marxist analysts today, Mike Davis, finally got around to noting the confluence of white nationalism and the Christian Right in Trump’s victory.  That it took so long for the socialist left to make this observation is disturbing and highlights the fact that if anti-fascists lack the theoretical sophistication of New Left Review contributors, they more than make up for it by actually fighting fascism and capitalism, rather than just writing about it, after the fact.

On the other hand, if antifa groups want to have a say in how to oppose fascism, theoretical clarity is certainly important. The reason the best anti-fascist fighters have always come from socialist, anarchist and communist traditions is because they understood the first principle of anti-fascism: fascism is our mortal enemy, and must be fought.

Saying as much need not always involve alliances with liberals and conservatives that necessarily mean capitulation to those forces. If one has a decisive advantage in intelligence, it can be used to establish the political parameters of such alliances or agreements. If, however, antifa groups do not have an ‘intelligence capacity’ they will cede the right to effectively fight fascism, and thereby protect communities under attack, to others. That right, by the way, is earned; sometimes in a dumpster.

Ghosts of Anti-Fascism Past

20 Friday Oct 2017

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I am half out of my chair, wagging a finger at a rumpled comrade across the conference table. He is mouthing yet another misbegotten argument. But, before I can lob a verbal hand grenade his way, my erstwhile rival employs a bit of misdirection, using a card trick to illustrate how ‘false populists’ dupe the unwitting into acting against their own interests. The slight of hand lards a meandering presentation, something about fighting extremism but accepting ‘real’ grievances, supporting tolerance and diversity but rejecting hate and privilege, and is taken by many in attendance to be the summit of human wisdom on the topic at hand, which is fascism. I want to throw something—or throw up. It is about 1995, somewhere in the United States (really anywhere will do) and a dear friend and mentor is quietly urging me to stop wagging my finger.

“Sit down!” He says.

“Fold your hands into your lap and let him speak…then pull it apart, piece by piece.”

Then, he whispers, “Omne trium perfectum. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you just told them.”

Huh.

Good advice when you are proposing ideas that break with accepted conventions; excellent advice if your emotions drive your intellect in the manner of a soap box orator. Throughout this gathering, held among fight-the-right activists from around the country, I try my best. But my best is not enough. My ideas don’t carry the day.

It is now some 20 years later and I’m not half out of my chair, nor am I standing on it. I’m throwing it—perhaps at you.

I am a ghost of anti-fascism past.

A restless spirit from history; a chair flying past your ear.

While I am not so arrogant to claim that if my ideas had carried the day then we wouldn’t be faced with a President Trump today, I am brash enough to state that the ideas which did carry the day during that gathering also failed to do as much.

Perhaps I can jog a memory that will cause you to shift uncomfortably in your chair. Am I mocking yet another premature obituary of the Christian right? Am I insisting that anti-fascists confront white nationalists on their own terrain? Am I noting how fascism can shape-shift and thereby ensure its enduring political relevance? Am I pounding my fist on the table, demanding foundations fund Antifa spy-craft instead of yet another conference on privilege? I hope the outline of my silhouette makes you a bit uneasy. But, behind every posthumous revenge lurks a pyrrhic victory. I am a ghost, after all, with nothing left of me but these words in the digital ether.

Don Hammerquist, in his valuable booklet Fascism & Anti-Fascism opens with the self-effacing statement:

“Feel free to shoot down any part of the argument, but remember that on the major points, validity isn’t ultimately a scholastic matter, but an issue that will be determined and ‘decided’ in struggle.” True enough. Feel free to attack what I write, too. However, keep in mind another dictum coined by C.L.R James on the same topic:

“A correct orientation does not mean victory. Incorrect orientations so glaringly false lead to certain defeat.” (The World Revolution 1917-1936, Chapter 12 “After Hitler, Our Turn”) The title of that chapter should be familiar to you, likewise the singular importance of its lesson.

With that in mind, here’s what I’m going to tell you, in three parts, naturally.

What you consider helpful in answering the age-old question ‘What is fascism?’ has probably been so inept as to invite that riposte rooted in mathematics: it is so bad it doesn’t even qualify as wrong. When trying to grasp the nature of fascism many radicals lean heavily on the tortured language of ‘populism’ and end up talking about choo-choo trains. Likewise, many socialists will suddenly morph into economic nationalists and start furiously digging analytical rabbit holes, reinforcing them with a maze of mirrors where we watch each other shadow box. It can be confusing. So, you probably don’t understand what fascism was, much less what it has become. Oh, I know. Who does? Even Nate Silver, that oracle of political prognostication, seemed shocked to find himself saying the words “white nationalism” on a podcast in the summer of 2016 when, had he understood the implications of what he was saying, it could have made a difference. But no matter, revolutionaries shouldn’t expect much from oracles. In any case, even back then it was clear that while the paleo-conservatives had successfully reinvented themselves as the alt-right through audacious counterintelligence initiatives such as the Acorn sting engineered by The Drudge Report, the salacious faux news of Brietbart, the white identitarian antics of Milos Yananoupoulis and the hacked Leninism of Steve Bannon, the progressive and socialist left were busy holding hands, examining and cross-examining their ‘privileges’ or feeling around for a phantom limb that had been amputated by the Democratic party. Meanwhile, much of the socialist left, including comrades at the International Socialist Organization (ISO) offered up wholly derivative, second rate accounts of fascism, forcing the tired bones of comrade Trotsky to carry their water, his petrified frame long ago having collapsed from the strain. But fascism is not a holdover from the past–a ‘basket of deplorables’ as some inept politician once remarked–nor ignorant hicks who clutch onto their God and guns because they fear being left behind. Fascism appears today as a tendency within our political and cultural age and offers itself as an exit strategy from the unsolvable contradictions of our present regimes of accumulation. It is thoroughly modern, or post-modern, if you insist. As white Christian nationalism it vies for supremacy within and between contemporary social classes throughout Europe and North America, where it has a political geography. That’s why Trump chose Pence as his running mate. It is real. It has always been with us. It is here, now and is both similar to, yet different from, ‘fascisms’ from previous eras. While this new fascism comes from the same family tree as its immediate predecessor, cold war fascism, and its antecedent, classical fascism, in important respects it differs from them, too. Getting that overlap and divergence correct is important. The Tea Party rebellion was the bridge between the end of cold war fascism and the beginning of 21st century fascism; of the transformation of the paleoconservative right—always the incubator of fascism in the United States—into the Alt-Right.

If you don’t know what fascism is, you will probably have a hard time fighting it effectively—even if you somehow arrive at the conclusion that it should be fought. Following the victory of Trump, liberals and progressives are leaping to join ‘the resistance’. But their methods follow their theory: fascism is something that comes from outside, not a tendency within our political culture. Their current obsession with Putin is a reflection of their diluted nationalism—what Albert Einstein called the “measles of humanity” that some Democrats offer as an alternative to the much more powerful Spanish Influenza on offer by Republicans. These “I’m With Her Anti-Fascists” who want Trump ridden out of town on a rail—preferably by the cowboys of the ‘Deep State’—should make any radical uncomfortable. But at least they recognize the existence of that political tendency, though their understanding of it is fatally flawed and their methods for confronting it a double-edged sword. On the other hand, for those of us from socialist, anarchist and communist traditions, it can be a bit disorienting to see an avowedly socialist journal such as Jacobin spend nearly seven years effectively arguing against the existence of, much less the need to fight, fascism. And that editorial line, that fighting the right amounts to nothing but the ‘anti-fascism of fools’ and support for ‘lesser evilism’, is pervasive amongst many radicals. With a redefinition of fascism along the lines I suggest, we might better retool our collective resistance to fascists and capitalists and carve out some space for emancipatory struggles. I am still waiting for long overdue mea culpas from socialists with integrity on this question.

Lastly, there can be no effective, comprehensive and permanent solution to the recurring problem of fascism without a revolutionary socialist project. The anti-fascist struggle is an indispensable crucible for revolutionary socialists, anarchists and communists–or should be. This understanding of fascism is informed by a theoretical framework rooted within a revolutionary left tradition—but one that is frequently overlooked, dismissed and denigrated by patrician socialists. A key insight into the nature of the kind of fascism we face today can be grasped by looking at the nuanced relationship that often exists between the far right and more traditionally conservative power centers. That relationship has long been a matter of fierce debate. What I will argue is that fascism has always been a constitutive part of capitalism, even when in opposition to it, but that that relationship is contested, a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the words of Leonard Zeskind. What all this means is that capitalist democracies will not and, more importantly, cannot decisively defeat fascism; they share too much in common with it. As revolutionary socialists, anarchists and communists we recognize this inescapable fact of our current predicament: Our mortal enemy is fascism. It cannot be decisively defeated without us and we should be preparing for the sacrifices necessary for the successful prosecution of that struggle. If need be, we will come back from the grave to kick its sorry ass back down the street.

In order to assert a new definition of fascism, theorize a contemporary movement against it and do so within the revolutionary socialist tradition (to restate what I am going to tell you) a note on who I am, is perhaps in order.

I’ve always been somewhat of a ‘bad school boy’—a peculiar revolutionary, perhaps even a walking contradiction: an insolent socialist who questions the centrality of workers to the democratic revolution; an anarchist in a suit who eschews affinity groups and consensus; a communist who refuses to join a communist party. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, for from each there is the possibility of a world outside the tyranny of the market, of work and of bosses, of violence, exploitation and domination. But, if our dreams and desires are dismissed as the daydreams of the naive and therefore nightmares for everyone else, (what used to be called ‘utopianism’, now ‘aspirationalism’ in current parlance) our future will be frozen within a capitalist democracy that will forever fail to be a democratic capitalism, thereby engendering the eternal return of fascist reaction. There the radical coreligionist dreams of a democratic socialism, an emancipatory anarchism and a communism of the commons will break our teeth and souls on the rocks of racism, nationalism and war. Now, facing a rising tide and ferocious surf of neofascism, it is imperative that we consider the following proposition at the heart of my dispatch from the past: Perhaps the unfinished Antifascist Revolution can bring together these warring siblings and deliver us from our current impasse.

That’s what the Antifa means to me.

What keeps me up at night, however, is quite different. In forthcoming dispatches I will expand upon the following themes.

  • The Sunkara Trap—There is little doubt that the most influential forum for socialist thought in the United States is the journal and blog called Jacobin. Founded in 2011 by its editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin has played a foundational role in the welcome revival of socialist politics. So it should come as no surprise that within its pages, hidden in plain view, is the best articulated reason why the left shit the bed so completely in the run up to Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency. Today Jacobin continues to refuse even the decency of a bedpan. Sunkara’s 2011 polemic, “A Thousand Platitudes: Liberal Hysteria and the Tea Party” argues that the best way for socialists to fight fascism is by channeling one’s inner Alexander Cockburn. That editorial line has been unceasing, sans any mea culpas, for going on seven years. It is disgraceful.
  • Leonard Zeskind’s Baloney—Wherein the most important anti-fascist thinker and activist in living memory gets awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, then no one bothers to read his book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement, much less follow the fervent, yet often funny, exhortations contained within it. Lenny’s singular contributions have largely been misunderstood and unheeded. I will endeavor to rescue what I consider to be his most important insights, even when I disagree with them. That he has managed to say more about white nationalism and fascism through a fanciful exploration of the invention of baloney is perhaps indicative of the low standards to which the question of fascism has been treated by the left.
  • The Political Geography of Fascism— A unique European and North American political phenomenon. Fascism has always had readily identifiable borders—physical, juridical and military and a white identity, and therefore racialized other, constructed around it.
  • Shibboleths—The central shibboleth for the anti-racist left is that ‘race is a social construct’. Once this is noted, get busy organizing a union. But, as Barbara Fields notes in Race Craft: The Soul of Inequality In American Life, it too often serves as a beginning and endpoint for discussion, thereby obscuring the endurance of racecraft, or how racism helps reproduce inequality. For liberals, the problem of racism and fascism is couched in the shibboleths of diversity, tolerance and being opposed to hate. Contemporary anti-fascism should demand more from its adherents.
  • A Definition, Not A Laundry List— From its earliest origins in the pitched street battles in Italy, fascism has had a seemingly contradictory history. Is it of the right or left? Is the most important question still whether fascism is a revolutionary or counterrevolutionary movement? What about fascism as a movement vs. fascism as a regime? Does fascism have a clear ideology, or is syncretism its hallmark? Is it a form of capitalist rule, or does it represent a movement outside of and opposed to capitalist rule? Is anti-Semitism a necessary ingredient in the fascist repertoire? Does fascism represent an intensification of racism and nationalism, or is it a different form of these ideologies? Does fascism only develop in opposition to an insurgent left? Indeed, the contributors to the Wikipedia entry on “Definitions of Fascism” seemingly throw up their hands: “What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments is a highly disputed subject that has proven complicated and contentious. Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long and furious debates concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets.” (retrieved April 21, 2017). Any useful definition of fascism should identify the necessary ingredients that are required for a noxious stew to be called fascist, yet it must exclude those ingredients, or any combination thereof, that would make it something else.
  • The MARS Motor— Wherein the Cold War-era sociologist Donald I. Warren in his book The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation, coins the term “Middle American Radicals”. Warren sought to capture the post civil rights era development of a self-consciously white dispossessed majority that saw itself caught between a cosmopolitan elite above and the poor, swarthy masses below. Unwittingly, Warren identified the signature double movement—fighting above and below—that needs to be present for something to rise to the threshold of being called fascist. I call it the ‘MARS Motor’ and when it is engaged fascists are on the move. It is the missing ingredient in most definitions of fascism. For, even when there is racist nationalism, militant storm troopers on the street and anti-Semitism functioning as a catalyst; when seemingly everything necessary and essential for something to be called fascist appears to be present, that particular constellation of forces will not be sufficient for it to be called fascist. The motor must kick in, otherwise it is garden variety right wing reaction, or even a particularly aggressive form of neoliberalism. Warren’s unit of analysis also foregrounds the importance of social class to any cogent definition of fascism without reducing it to an epiphenomenon–the proverbial tail wagging the dog as with so much scholarship that employs categories such as ‘petis bourgeoisie’, ‘downwardly mobile white working class’, or ‘finance capital’.
  • Periodizing Fascism—Over the near century of its existence we can identify three major phases of fascist development–Classical, (1923–1945) Cold War (1945–1991) and 21st Century (2001—present). The gap between 1991 and 2001 is an interregnum. It would be useful to take a page from Regis Debray’s 2007 New Left Review article “Socialism: A Life Cycle” and map fascism along similar lines.
  • Positive Patriotism, Negative Nationalism—The ‘populism’ of the Pink Tide is not exportable to the capitalist core, where it must contend with a political geography of white nationalism. In other words, there is no positive patriotism possible here or in Europe without negative nationalism. Witness the limits of celebrity atheletes refusing to pledge allegience. Podemos and La France Insoumise, Laclau and Mouffe, Corbynites and Democratic Socialists of America all essentially trade the Internationale for the Tricolor with predictable results: fascism continues its long march through the institutions that constitute its natural habitat.
  • Fascism and the Zombie Horde—No, no, no. The zombies are us. They are always us. From George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to the most complete expression of the zombie horror sub genre, World War Z, the zombies are us—its what happens to everyone who tries to exist outside of market relations—you die.
  • Populism Here, Populism There, Populism Everywhere—Toss that fetid word-salad into the garbage. Originally mixed by cold war-era sociologists and political scientists, the term ‘populism’ is what you get when you no longer believe in a subject called ‘the people’. It refers to everything, therefore can explain nothing and has its utility limited to telling us something about the political baggage of who is using the term rather than anything about any referent it claims to denote.
  • GOT Und Uber—How one cultural touchstone, the blood and soil soap opera, Game of Thrones and an economic one, the global ride share behemoth Uber, prefigure the rise of Donald Trump.

END