An Intimate History of Antifa

By Daniel Penny August 22, 2017

On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish

dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of
London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British Union
of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash would
eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a
blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six
thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded
homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned
over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the
marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats,
shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and
his men were forced to retreat.

In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by Melville

House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as a
potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition
outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement
fizzled. For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the
incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight
against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the
United States. According to Bray, Antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can
variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or
milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement
whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism,
anti-racism. The movement’s profile has surged since Antifa activists
engaged in a wave of property destruction during Donald Trump’s
Inauguration—when one masked figure famously punched the white
supremacist Richard Spencer in the face—and ahead of a planned
appearance, in February, by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California,
Berkeley, which was cancelled. At the “Unite the Right” rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, a number of Antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked
entrances to Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to
gather. Fights broke out; some Antifa activists reportedly sprayed chemicals
and threw paint-filled balloons. Multiple clergy members credited activists
with saving their lives. Fox News reported that a White House petition urging
that Antifa be labelled a terrorist organization had received more than a
hundred thousand signatures.

Bray’s book is many things: the first English-language transnational history

of Antifa, a how-to for would-be activists, and a record of advice from anti-
Fascist organizers past and present—a project that he calls “history, politics,
and theory on the run.” Antifa activists don’t often speak to the media, but
Bray is a former Occupy Wall Street organizer and an avowed leftist; he has
intimate access to his subjects, if not much critical distance from them.
Especially in later chapters of the book, that access helps him to provide an
unusually informed account of how Antifa members conceptualize their
disruptive and sometimes violent methods.

Many liberals who are broadly sympathetic to the goals of Antifa criticize the
movement for its illiberal tactics. In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Peter
Beinart, citing a series of incidents in Portland, Oregon, writes, “The people
preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland
may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing
on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.”
(Beinart’s piece is headlined “The Rise of the Violent Left.”) According to
Bray, though, Antifa activists believe that Fascists forfeit their rights to speak
and assemble when they deny those same rights to others through violence
and intimidation. For instance, last week, the North Dakota newspaper The
Forum published a letter from Pearce Tefft in which he recalled a chilling
exchange about free speech with his son, Peter, shortly before Peter headed
to the rally in Charlottesville. “The thing about us fascists is, it’s not that we
don’t believe in freedom of speech,” the younger Tefft reportedly said to his
father. “You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven.”

For Bray and his subjects, the horror of this history and the threat of its
return demands that citizens, in the absence of state suppression of
Fascism, take action themselves. Bray notes that state-based protections
failed in Italy and Germany, where Fascists were able to take over
governments through legal rather than revolutionary means—much as the
alt-right frames its activities as a defense of free speech, Fascists were able
to spread their ideology under the aegis of liberal tolerance. Antifa does not
abide by John Milton’s dictum that, “in a free and open encounter,” truthful
ideas will prevail. “After Auschwitz and Treblinka,” Bray writes, “anti-fascists
committed themselves to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis
to say anything.”

Part of Antifa’s mission is to establish, as Bray puts it, “the historical

continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of
collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the
past century.” To this end, the first half of his book is a somewhat rushed
history of anti-Fascist groups. The progenitors of Antifa, in this account,
were the German and Italian leftists who, following the First World War,
banded together to fight proto-Fascist gangs. In Italy, these leftists gathered
under the banner of Arditi del Popolo (“the People’s Daring Ones”), while in
Weimar Germany, groups like Antifaschistische Aktion, from which Antifa
takes its name, evolved from paramilitary factions of existing political parties.
Bray moves swiftly to the failure of anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War,
then races through the second half of the twentieth century. In the late
seventies, the punk and hardcore scenes became the primary sites of open
conflict between leftists and neo-Nazis; that milieu prefigures much of the
style and strategy now associated with the anti-Fascist movement. In the
Netherlands and Germany, a group of leftist squatters known as Autonomen
pioneered the Black Bloc approach: wearing all-black outfits and masks to
help participants evade prosecution and retaliation. Bray reaches the present
with his description of “Pinstripe Fascists,” such as Geert Wilders, and the
rise of new far-right parties and groups in both Europe and America. The
book flits between countries and across decades; analysis is sparse. The
message is that Antifa will fight Fascists wherever they appear, and by any
means necessary.

The book’s later chapters, such as “Five Historical Lessons for Anti-Fascists”
and “ ‘So Much for the Tolerant Left!’: ‘No Platform’ and Free Speech,” which
are adapted from essays published elsewhere, are more focussed and
persuasive. Here Bray explicitly deals with the philosophical and practical
problems of Antifa: violence versus nonviolence; mass movements versus
militancy; choosing targets and changing tactics. Bray concedes that the
practice of disrupting Fascist rallies and events could be construed as a
violation of the right to free speech and assembly—but he contends that
such protections are meant to prevent the government from arresting
citizens, not to prevent citizens from disrupting one another’s speech.
Speech is already curtailed in the U.S. by laws related to “obscenity,
incitement to violence, copyright infringement, press censorship during
wartime,” and “restrictions for the incarcerated,” Bray points out. Why not
add one more restriction—curtailing hate speech—as many European
democracies do? As for the slippery-slopists, afraid that Antifa will begin
with Fascists and eventually attack anybody who opposes them, Bray
maintains that the historical record does not support this fear: anti-Fascists
who have shut down local hate groups, as in Denmark, usually go dark
themselves, or turn their attention to other political projects, rather than
finding new enemies to fight. (In his Atlantic piece, Beinart notes, “When
fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too.”)

Violence, Bray insists, is not the preferred method for past or present Antifa
—but it is definitely on the table. He quotes a Baltimore-based activist who
goes by the name Murray to explain the movement’s outlook:

You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t
have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have
 to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to
fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight
them with tanks.

There is a moral logic to this notion of anticipatory self-defense, but the

progression, from writing letters to fighting with guns, is worrisome
nonetheless. Right-wing militiamen in Charlottesville made a point of
displaying force, and this was reportedly “unnerving to law enforcement
officials on the scene.” Should anti-Fascists start toting AR-15s, like the
right-wing Oathkeepers? The idea can seem naïve in an American context,
where, practically speaking, only white people can carry guns openly without
fear of police interference. Bray mentions a few pro-gun Antifa groups,
including the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and a collective with the punning
moniker Trigger Warning; he quibbles with liberal scholars, including Erica
Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who dismiss violent protest as an
ineffective tool for garnering public support. But it is unclear from the book
whether he thinks that brandishing guns is an ethical concern as well as a
tactical one, or whether he worries about an escalation of violence. Postwar
Antifa, as Bray details in earlier chapters, has largely been a European
project, in which opposing sides sometimes beat each other senseless and
stabbed one another to death. They didn’t have assault rifles. The Battle of
Cable Street was fought with rocks and paving stones.

What were the effects of Cable Street, exactly? Scholars continue to debate
the showdown’s consequences. After the battle, Mosley, like present-day
Fascists, was able to cast himself in the role of a law-abiding victim
assaulted by immigrant hordes. In the months following, Fascist youth
attacked London’s Jewish residents and businesses in what became known
as the Mile End Pogrom, and the British Union of Fascists did better at the
polls in 1937 than they had in years prior. Bray argues that such results do
not undermine the legacy of the incident, because it radicalized and
galvanized a community, which continued to fight Fascists in Britain through
the buildup to the war and beyond, and whose efforts were largely
successful.

In the British press, at least, Cable Street has been referenced repeatedly in
coverage of the protests and the terrorism in Charlottesville, an event that
has forced a discussion of what to do when far-right extremists come to your
town. Bray, for his part, believes that one can practice “everyday anti-
fascism” by confronting bigots in nonviolent ways, “from calling them out, to
boycotting their business, to shaming them for their oppressive beliefs, to
ending a friendship unless someone shapes up.” The point, as he sees it, is
to shut down Fascists not just in the street but in every interaction. “An anti-
fascist outlook has no tolerance for ‘intolerance.’ ” he writes. “It will not
‘agree to disagree.’ ”