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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

Information Deserts

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Oregon Fire

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In addition to those geographical areas we call “food deserts” because they lack access to affordable and nutritious food, we need to consider the growth of “information deserts,” areas that lack affordable and informative news. I’ve been trying to follow the #Almedafire in Southern Oregon for the past 24-hours, only to repeatedly return to raw emergency feeds from first responders in the hopes of piecing together what’s happening on the ground. Traditional news outlets are practically useless–the Medford Mail Tribune, together with all other print media, took their usual ten-hour sabbatical last night right as the fire was raging through four Southern Oregon cities. The combined power of all network television managed to stream one stationary camera from atop a hill until it too disappeared due to a loss of power. Radio stations kept to their regularly featured programs of commercial advertising, interspersed with soft-rock, shock jock, and QAnon-talk; often the two were indistinguishable. Social media was only somewhat more useful. Facebook was wildly uneven. Instant live streamers captured flames devouring houses and gas stations, occasionally providing the “who, what, when, where, how and why” of basic reporting but more often than not cutting away for long segments about their shoelaces or pets. Facebook commentary, often the only source of news on any given live video feed, skewed toward that of a sewer spewing conspiracy theories that mostly blamed Antifa for fires from San Diego to Washington state. Twitter, while marginally better at providing on-the-ground breaking news, was also rife with whacky speculation and short on useful information.
What is clear is that print, television, and radio are dead. It’s not clear, however, what, if anything, is going to replace them.

A basket-of-deplorables liberal or an ivory tower radical might attribute all this to a reactionary environment peculiar to Southern Oregon, but I don’t think that’s the case. The preponderance of Antifa conspiracy theories mixed with frantic calls to evacuate animal shelters and department stores is not unique to Southern Oregon; neither is the almost complete disregard for the wholesale destruction of mobile home parks and the health and safety of undocumented populations, the houseless, and other vulnerable populations. Such reactionary hand-wringing for the estates of the wealthy and vineyards of the well-to-do, together with a corresponding disdain for working people is not unique to Southern Oregon. It may be more pronounced in such liberal cradles of opulence as Malibu and Marin; Lake Oswego and Mercer Island, somewhat less so in timber towns.

Much like the new citizen streamers who cover BLM protests for platforms like Twitch, Periscope, and Facebook, alternative forms of ”news” are welcome, but also deeply problematic. Where such streamers are not advocacy journalists clearly on the side of Black Lives Matter and anti-fascism, they often provide footage authorities can use to prosecute comrades. Even when they are on our side, their quest for clout, clicks, and followers ($) inadvertently aids the powers that be. In their frequent attempts to emulate uncritically received notions of “unbiased” reporting, “fair and balanced” coverage, and a misbegotten heroic pursuit of the “Truth” they trammel on all of these values, and many more besides. But we need them; otherwise, we would be left with the corporate press and the underfunded and out-of-touch “old left” media.

In the case of local emergencies, like the firestorms raging out here in the west, our principles of solidarity and mutual aid demand that we find ways to fill the gap between the tendency of traditional forms of media to misinform us, and the emergence of new forms of (social) media for which it is hard to distinguish between information, misinformation, and disinformation. The reason both new and old forms of media are hapless in the face of local emergencies and disasters is due, of course, to the same trends that have left us so vulnerable to COVID-19: privatization, austerity, JIT logistics, and crumbling public infrastructures, especially health and welfare. Following the tenets of disaster capitalism, the predictable carnage that results is quickly followed by the savage depredations Wall Street and Silicon Valley engineer for profit.


We need a new “citizen” reporter network with the politics of Unicorn Riot but with the reach of Fox News; we need Woke.net but without the “Black Conservative Preacher” and anti-Semitic feeds it features. This will only happen if we take our cues from the decentralized, horizontal, anti-authoritarian BLM and anti-fascist demonstrations underway across cities small and large. If we focus on maximizing what’s great about new social media as a news provider, together with minimizing what’s rotten, we might be able to provide nutritious and delicious information for the masses and thereby fertilize these information deserts so that something beautiful can bloom.
END

An Antifascist Army

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As a ghost of antifascism I sometimes take the liberty to be somewhat controversial. I will now take that liberty.

I despise professional sports. The more popular the sport, the more I hate it. The larger the audience, the louder the crowd, the brighter the fireworks, the faster the jets–the more I want to throw up.

Even the term ‘professional sports’ is offensive, seemingly calculated to help us forget that these ‘professionals’ are skilled workers engaged in labor within a capitalist enterprise. That enterprise rakes in considerable profits from the surplus value created by those workers. These corporations are for profit, and share the same means of enforcing exploitation and domination as an oil company, weapons manufacturer or, for that matter, a charitable foundation.

Furthermore, the non-millionaire workers who park cars, cook hotdogs, clean bathrooms and stitch hats are invisible. As with all corporations, it is from the least powerful that the lions share of value is created and then stolen by others; then that process is hidden from us. In coliseums and arenas it seems our otherwise sharp ‘critical criticism’ is set aside to allow for unbridled support for a team or competitor. There is also a certain fidelity to white settler state militarism often aptly represented by mascots, e.g., cowboys and Indians.

Professional sports are also prime vectors for the reproduction of the pathological male gaze: men, beer and hot dog in hand and mouth watching men, balls in hand in combat with one another; meanwhile women busy themselves watching those men watching men and imagine how they look to those men. Ugh. This is the male supremacy algorithm that dominates professional sports, and why there is still no out gay (American) football player who hasn’t faced organized and violent opposition of one form or another. Give it time, you might say, by the turn of the next century I’m sure there will be an out gay quarterback, or perhaps even a transgender one. But that’s precisely my point–there is no point to this short of transforming the very nature of competition by obliterating that which upholds it all–private property. Capitalism has proven itself to be the most efficient means by which to organize a form of ‘free time’ that is misogyny masquerading as sport. Big fucking deal. What an accomplishment. Oh, and don’t get me started about the grotesque enslavement that is ‘college sports’ and its cannibalism practiced on higher education, two things that should never be spoken of in the same breath. Finally, it seems that within the American tradition of professional sports ‘politics’ is verboten. If you ask me, not much to recommend here. Since when did a radical cheer on a corporation?

Remember, corporations are legalized dictatorships–they practice a form of economic totalitarianism fundamentally at odds with democracy and equality. This is what Milton Friedman meant by making the economic realm supreme, where the profit motive can replace democracy altogether. That’s the neoliberal agenda and it is not necessarily at odds with a white nationalist and male supremacist one. They can function hand and glove. Get it?

Not all sports are subject to my scorn; just those that are capitalist enterprises. Amateur sports, especially kids sports, are another matter entirely. Here, as with all facets of social life that have managed to remain at least partially outside ‘the economic’ one can find healthy and wholesome competition. Some of my most precious memories are of amateur sports. Sporting competition outside private markets and organized capitalist insanity used to be enshrined in the Olympics. Remember when it was for amateurs only? Friendly competition between nations? Remember when those scrubs from the beer league bested the Soviet hockey team? Now it is a loathsome spectacle of corporate corruption, preening celebrities and vicious gentrification programs that vacuum up the wealth of entire cities.

So it is with such disdain in mind that I turn to the Portland Timbers, a professional sports corporation no different from those discussed above, but with a fan club, the Timbers Army, unlike any other, except perhaps one: FC St. Pauli Hamburg (Germany).

First some bona fides. I have been an antifascist for more than 30 years and spent a good part of the 1980s and 1990s making that a full time occupation. During 1996 I visited 15 cities throughout Germany on a speaking tour in a concerted effort to meet and better coordinate with comrades fighting the far right there. In the United States the Oklahoma City bombing had recently taken place while Germany was in the throes of an insurgent mass-based racist anti immigrant movement. My speaking tour was hosted by radical antifascists, autonomists, ‘refoundation’ communists, squatters, anarchists and trade unionists. In Hamburg (my favorite venue of the tour) I was given the t-shirt pictured above by antifascist supporters of FC St. Pauli.

The far left, antifascist credentials of the FC St. Pauli club go back to the 1980s, which is when the Antifa began to be revived in Europe and North America. There are other European football clubs with one foot in socialism, but few that are as militant as FC St. Pauli. There are many more fan clubs with both feet in fascism.

The Timbers Army antifascism owes much to this left wing political tradition, and it is a welcome development. The Timbers Army are to antifascism in the United States what FC St. Pauli are to German and European antifascism. But the Timbers Army is also a creature of its social milieu and therefore a football fan club. I don’t live in Portland or follow any sort of football. But so long as a sports club is antifascist, I’m interested in what they mean by that and what they do about it.

Now, I am partial to the original antifascist symbol, that of the red and black flag, but I can accept others.

Also, I might chafe at Timbers Army supporters using one of three iconic arrows to target ‘communism’, or other ‘Iron Front’ antifascists distancing themselves from groups self identified as ‘antifa’, or the distinction without a difference made between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’, but I will uphold their rightful place within the larger antifascist movement. I would expect the same in return.

If the Timbers Army were to reach its full potential, what might that look like? Here the limits of a fan club become a bind. But there is a way forward: don’t just bite the hand that feeds you, take the whole arm and use it to beat the living shit out of your master. And you do have a master.

The Timbers football team is owned by Hank Paulson—the guy who helped orchestrate the bailout of America’s plutocrats and ensure the continued immiseration of the rest of us after the global shitting of the bed that was the ‘financial crisis’ of 2007-2009. During a recent match where Timbers Army supporters observed 33 minutes of silence to protest a ban on their antifascist symbols, Paulson, together with his son, also an owner, is said to have blamed the loss of that match on this vocal antifascism. It seems to me that what should be done here is pretty clear.

Radicals within the Timbers Army should agitate for the obvious next step in political development, a step that should exacerbate contradictions and divisions within the enemy camp and reinforce solidarity and unity within ours: It’s time for a community-owned Portland Timbers. The decommodification of our leisure time is an antifascist action and goal, or should be.

At issue here is not whether the owners are antifascist enough, but why anyone should own our leisure time? Here is a political movement on a platter: a loathsome dictator (every CEO is that) who is also shoving nepotism down the throats of supporters all the while undermining popular antifascism. This is also an issue all antifascists–antifa and social Democrat’s alike–could agree on. Some, however will undoubtedly cry in their beer: the defense of private property, rather than its abolition, is antifascist. Such nonsense presents itself as an opportunity to separate the antifascist wheat from chafe and reclaim that which belongs to the commons.

In any case I will always hate professional sports, perhaps not as much as corporations that manufacture cluster bombs, but not much less, either. What’s important is that there is an alternative that is possible and that we are willing to fight for it.

END

Counterintuitives—Hate The Good Hate

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An old comrade would often remind young antifascists of two sayings.

Nazis are people too.

Fighting Nazis can be fun.

The first I always understood as a reminder that even the most vile and violent fascists have all too human motivations at work, often quite pedestrian. In order to fight them effectively, one must understand them on their own terms. Not empathize with them, but understand them so as to defeat them.

I don’t agree, but I understand.

This, rather than a variation on what I gather to be the original saying, “kids are people too”. It was never meant to mean ‘don’t punch Nazis’, allow them platforms or that doxing is mean.

Which leads us to the second saying, ‘fighting Nazis can be fun’. Antifascist action, especially that work undertaken in the shadows, can be painstaking and laborious, with results that don’t yield immediate benefits. Rewards and plaudits will not be forthcoming, because Antifa activists, by definition, are anonymous. Some comrades will attack your work as adventurist or so much tilting at windmills. So what’s to recommend? Anti fascists fight fascists and uphold the red and the black. That, and at the end of the day, dance once in awhile, then do what LKJ said, so as to dance on their graves. Did you get that?

To these fine recommendations I offer a third that on first glance may appear cheeky, even disingenuous. But I mean it sincerely.

Hate the good hate.

Hate is a strong word. We have come to associate it with the foulest expressions of bigotry, as we should. But there is a flip side to this emotion and the language that expresses it that, if left only to the bigots, can render us monolingual. We should speak from love, but not always. Too often the language of love renders as false hope rather than daring audacity; surrender and victimhood are misrepresented as progress; tolerating that which is intolerable is upheld as a virtue.

We love our enemies, it is true, but that love must insist on our own common humanity, precisely that which they deny. When they deny even our basic human dignity, the bile will rise up in your throat. So as not to choke on it, you must spit it out.

Spit it back at them.

Hate the good hate.

Just be mindful of whom you strike, how and why.

If you can, live to fight another day; if not, leave us, and them, something to remember you by.

But strike back, nonetheless.

Strike back with fury, precision and devastating effectiveness.

Strike back.

Hate the good hate.

END

Love Letter To The Antifa

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Dear Antifa,

After all these years, I remain hopelessly in love with you.

From our first meeting, I was head over heels.

The initial courtship, that labor of love called the Antifascist Archives Project, blossomed into a passionate love affair.

We became friends, comrades and lovers.

You would tutor me in the manner of a sober socialist dialectician. But, Oh!–how my heart would skip a beat and I would blush when you pronounced the word, “dialectician.”

So many late nights with comrades buried in newspaper clippings, pamphlets and balaclavas, it was a wonder we ever slept.

That cold call you insisted I make to an old Yippie–“castigate him for not sufficiently appreciating the legacy of the Black Panthers,” you exhorted. That same old Yippie would laugh uproariously at my chutzpah, then spend countless hours sharing trade secrets over latkes and coffee.

“Only from ignorance can the greatest leaps of wisdom be made,” you later said.

Thrumming your fingers on a wooden desk piled high with papers, you look up: “The best protection from being infiltrated by your enemies is to infiltrate them. Simple and irrefutable. Know what they are thinking before they think it; act before they act. Then crush them.”

You were always straight to the point.

Long before his posthumously published Millennium Trilogy, you claimed Stieg Larsson as one of our own–an international socialist and antifascist who lapped other researchers by practicing the dark arts of Antifa spycraft, all the while hewing close to your dictums.

Gazing up at the entrance to a segregated country club, you mused: “Pedagogy is important. Where the rich have been so shortsighted as to construct their temples of conspicuous consumption in close proximity to us, we will occupy them so as to provide a teachable moment.”

The Great Game, by Leopold Trepper, always at your fingertips.

“Trapped between the anvil of Stalin and the hammer of Hitler, Trepper chose an independent, antifascist communism. He also developed long term spies and a formidable intelligence network.”

Later: “Sometimes I feel trapped between the hammer of Trump and the anvil of Clinton.”

You were never so relaxed and jovial as with that knock-nosed miner from Northern England. The Godfather of the American Antifa (who, in keeping with tradition shall remain anonymous) dispatched this foul mouthed hooligan to disrupt fascist enclaves in the Pacific Northwest, and we sang songs about gay and lesbian liberation, armed strikes and Native resistance.

In 1996, over weird breakfasts and not a few pints in a baker’s dozen of cities throughout Germany you showed me the Antifa flag flying high.

“Look”, you pointed up. “There, hoisted high above that community center, the red and the black. The only flag the Antifa will ever fly–if it flies one at all.”

You were everywhere over there after the fall of that wall, from Stuttgart to Bremen, Wuppertal to Keil and of course Berlin and the wonderful organized chaos of Kreuzberg.

“What’s that smell?”, I asked in Leipzig. “Braunkohle”, you murmured, “distinctive and dirty.”

Defending refugees the urgent task of the day; fighting cops what the Antifa did on its lunch break.

“All cops are bastards,” you would spit, the taste of cayenne pepper fresh in your mouth.

Later: “Most cops are workers, too. Find a few still capable of cognitive dissonance; they will help us liberate their intelligence reports on fascists and identify racist cops.”

Then, after a shot and a beer, another tattoo, and dancing to LKJ at a meet up with the RABL, you woke up with a terrific hangover, then got back at it.

As you remember I continued to fight fascism, and fascists, but sometimes wound up in odd situations, occasionally a forum where I did not belong.

You never thought much of that cocky, droll southern lawyer and his legal sophistry; less of the television repairman and his White Aryan Resistance. Something was amiss during that trial and verdict. I have heard rumors of a fateful meeting at a Shari’s Restaurant that one day will provide a curious postmortem to this instance of American justice carried out in the little city known as ‘Little Beirut’.

Sometime thereafter I was drafted to appear before an unofficial meeting of some subcommittee or another of the United States Congress, where I read something about terrorists and white supremacists.

You shrugged.

I lectured judges about ‘citizen militias’ and white supremacists, keen to know if any of them were sympathetic.

We always found a few.

I then became an unpublished footnote to a libel suit filed by a peripatetic Holocaust denier, a suit he lost to a scholar of the Holocaust.

“I see you are slated to provide testimony for the trial,” you casually noted.

“Will they be in wigs?” I asked.

“Yes,” you said, “but it won’t be as much fun as a drag show.”

I stayed home.

Finally, I was approached (not the first time) to expand my intelligence network to target a part of the left that was dancing with brownshirts. I refused.

The request came from an unlikely source, and its refusal was difficult. What’s more, the logic behind the request and its integrity were not without foundation. It was something I would not do, but, could not categorically state should not be done. That’s a conundrum.

Ugh. I was a mess. So was the left.

But I never betrayed you, a statement many comrades close to you then, and perhaps close to you now, cannot truthfully say.

Sometime later you passed me a note which read, simply “What have we become?”

I burrowed deep within my files.

The bloom was off the rose.

Then I left. Or was shown the door. Probably a bit of both. I cast myself adrift, but always found myself moored somewhere close to you. I thought perhaps you would be better off without me. I watched from a distance, and you were hardly aware of my existence.

Throughout many years I’ve never really had another proper lover; paramours, flings, but nothing serious.

After you, no one could compare.

Today things are much different. Today the fascists are on the march and there are more of them. But so too have the red and the black multiplied and spread.

When Trump noted that opposition to the Antifa would include cops, soldiers and “tough guys” no one leapt to your defense.

Radicals who should have leapt to your defense instead demurred.

Others, however, expressed their solidarity.

The Socialist Rifle Association through its slogan “Arm the Working Class”, is an antidote to both the National Rifle Association and David Hogg. They are organic allies to the Antifa, as I’m sure you would agree.

I see you deepening your ties to allied antiracist, anticapitalist, left struggles. Even the New York Times references you, once removed, in begrudging acknowledgement of your successes.

Recent efforts by Al Jazeera, Hate Not Hope and even The Stranger in Seattle to infiltrate fascist groups follow a template you established.

But the terrain will be tricky.

Recently you were bashing the fash when a comrade approached you wearing a button that read, “I Am George Soros”. You shrugged, “Billionaires can take care of themselves, until we do. And fuck Charlie.”

A few months ago you exclaimed, “Look here! There is a veritable cottage industry in doxing, outing, de-platforming, shaming, exposing and ostracizing fascists online.”

A bit later, “human intelligence is often the foundation for signals intelligence. Not the other way around.”

When discussion strayed and the autonomous nature of the Antifa in doubt, you would retort:

“The Antifa is a conspiracy: Small, local, anonymous, decentralized, and flexible, with both feet churning in para politics, holding a compass oriented to the red and black.

Then:

“It has a twofold mission.

“First, fight fascism by attacking fascists. Destroy their capacity and disrupt their organizing.

“Second, protect kindred movements from attack. As socialists, anarchists and communists, the Antifa places priority on left popular movements and communities targeted by fascists.

“Safeguard the political integrity and independence of the Antifa in part by never using spycraft against the left or targeted communities.”

Warming up to it, you would continue:

“The Antifa is not a mass organization. The Antifa is not a, much less the, vanguard.

“The Antifa does not base build, hold conferences on privilege, organize unions, coordinate voter registration drives or practice entryism. All of these can be fine activities, but are not the province of the Antifa proper.

Finally, channeling Lenin or Luxemburg:

“The Antifa is a defensive formation that fights a rearguard battle against fascists to clear and prepare the way for popular revolutionary movements.”

“The Antifa does not fight to preserve liberal democracy, nor on behalf of liberal democracy, nor even according to the norms of liberal democracy; only, when appropriate, alongside liberal democracy, in opposition to fascism.”

“Such support is provisional and never in support of capitalist war, only class war.”

I’m breathing heavy just remembering your off-the-cuff harangues.

“Having an intelligence advantage is often a prerequisite to everything else. If you don’t develop it, you will be dependent on the state or para state formations to do so. That’s a relationship of dependence that will corrode your principles.

“Be bold. Push the envelope. Be conspiratorial.

“When recruiting people to infiltrate fascist organizations, ‘already antifascists’ are always preferable to someone motivated by money, or a recent epiphany. Leave them to the ADL and SPLC.”

As I look upon you now, in an epic battle with fascism, my love burns anew, if a bit less bright.

Do you still consider me one of your ‘original gangsters’? An O.G. Antifa? After all, once a gangster…

I am also, of course, an Old Ghost of Antifascism.

Whatever I am to you, I will always love you.

Jonathan

Zombies vs The Superhero

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Have you ever seen a superhero take a shit?

Every superhero secretly craves the limelight, and will even battle one another for it.

The superhero is a con artist, a narcissist posing as an altruist. Hence the disguise.

The superhero is a reclusive millionaire (Batman) a flamboyant millionaire (Tony Stark) a magical millionaire (Dr. Strange) or, getting right to it, a god (Thor).

The arch-enemy of a superhero emerges from the shortcomings of that superhero; the wealth and privilege the superhero defends produce the evil they will eventually vanquish, at their leisure.

The superhero sets the barn on fire, then expects applause when they put it out.

For zombies, a superhero is scum coagulating at the top of a boiling pot.

Zombies stir that pot.

Zombies are filthy and eat without utensils.

Zombies eat brains because direct action against cognitive capital never tasted so good.

Zombies are the salt of the earth, the great unwashed.

Zombies swarm and are anonymous.

Zombies say, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’; the superhero says, “hold my cape.”

Zombies rush through borders, climb over walls; a superhero builds them.

Zombies cry out: No Pasaran! The superhero pats us on the head, and says, “this too shall pass.”

Zombies harness the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ against the private power of the few.

Zombies lose their teeth and hair from disease; the superhero secretly harvests black market organs so as to live forever.

Zombies act to satisfy basic needs and desires denied them; the superhero stands for ‘a man and his castle’ and ‘every man for himself’.

The superhero is, in a word, an ubermensch. A word from which every zombie recoils, yet also a meat sack every zombie will devour with relish.

To the superhero, zombies are irredeemably different, less than human, and an eternal threat; to zombies, a superhero is meat.

A superhero will hold the line.

Zombies do not wait in lines.

Zombies just don’t behave.

A superhero is clean, bright, mostly white, fashionable, and, above all, ironic.

Irony: when fate conspires, unexpectedly and often humorously, against you.

Zombies don’t believe in fate.

Zombies believe that ‘we make our own history, just not in conditions of our own making.’

(Zombies slur their speech, so I may not have got that exactly right.)

Zombies feast on superhero irony, then spit the bones into that boiling pot.

Zombies are anti-heroes, yet also something more than just the opposite of a hero; something more than a collection of individuals who either shuffle or run really fast.

Zombies represent that movement towards liberation the masses carry out when, by becoming a class for themselves, they engage that inexorable motor of history, the struggle of poor against rich, class against class, us vs them–and win.

No gods.

No masters.

No superheroes.

We are many, they are few.

‘Everything we want is in the end of you’.

END

Antifa Spycraft

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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

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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.

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