Who's an antifascist? 3+ approaches

The centrists who got us into this mess are finally calling it fascism, and in a hurry to declare themselves antifascists. Meanwhile, in the US and elsewhere, the rush to criminalize antifascism and to demonize “antifa” continues.

But what does antifascism mean, actually? There have been some excellent books on the topic, and in the excerpt below, from my forthcoming The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to Twenty-First Century Fascism, I try to offer a broad, quick and schematic overview of several competing approaches.

It’s far from the final or most comprehensive or nuanced word on the matter, and it’s obviously skewed towards the Anglosphere, but my hope is that, in the struggles to come, it can offer an elementary tool for at least being able to recognize some key conflicts among those who would lay claim to an antifascist politics.

The book, which will be open-access (i.e. the digital version is free) is out on September 15 (coincidentally, the same day as Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein’s End Times Fascism). I would greatly appreciate it if you might:

• Recommend it to libraries, bookstores and other venues

• Pass along news to relevant podcasts and consider writing a review, or forward it on to a journal, magazine or other venue that might write a review

• Share news on social media

Please get in touch if you’d like an advanced reader copy.

If you’re interested in the theme, you can also still join the Fighting Fascist Feelings online course Sarah Stein Lubrano and I are running twice a week from June 29 until July 16.

Oh and in other important news, two new books are out this summer as part of VAGABONDS, the series I edit for Pluto:

• Decolonizing Money: The Promise of Abolishing the US Dollar, by Julio Linares

• Community Safety in the Fourth World War: Notes on Insurgent Conviviality, by Manuel Callahan and Annie Paradise

More about them in the next newsletter!

Like fascism itself, antifascism is a term hotly contested, even since it first emerged in the 1920s. In part, this has to do with the ambiguity of the term fascism itself, which, as we have seen, routinely refuses to define itself, in part because it is objectively incoherent and in part because of what I have been calling the fascist flex: the conspicuous abuse of discourse that signifies the fascist will-to-power. As Jean-Paul Sartre warned, in stridently and bombastically insisting on the coherence of ideological nonsense, fascism makes a spectacle of its power.

This makes antifascism difficult to define, all the more so in the wake of twentieth-century fascism’s notorious infamy. Many regimes and movements around the world have laid claim to an antifascist legacy, often as a means of legitimation that recalls the heroic and world historical struggle against the German, Italian, and Japanese fascist regimes and their clients.

This is certainly the case in the West, where Nazis appear time and again in educational materials and popular culture as the quintessential evil, and where the fight against them holds pride of place as the one true “good war” where Western freedom triumphed over tyranny.

But similar narratives persist elsewhere. In the former USSR, which unquestionably did the most and paid the highest price for defeating the Nazis, the memory of the “Great Patriotic War” is of massive ideological importance, including in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, where the fascistic regime of Vladimir Putin has been able to displace accusations of fascism and recast the internationalist Soviet victory in the name of Russian nationalism.

The Chinese Communist Party defines itself as the saviours of the nation from Japanese and then nationalist fascists, and sees Taiwan, which it seeks to reincorporate, historically at least, a breakaway fascist enclave .

Beyond the cynical and self-serving manipulation of the antifascist legacy by state actors, we might say that there are three broad approaches to the question of how to oppose fascism: liberal, socialist, and antiauthoritarian. I will paint them here in broad strokes, and I am trying to capture something of their essence, rather than parse the intricate debates that animate each.

My effort here is not to provide a complete or categorical model but simply to identify a few key disagreements and fault lines that will help us open up the complexity of antifascism.

In the liberal imagination, fascism results from the weakness or sabotage of liberal capitalist institutions and can be countered by the strengthening and support for those institutions.

In response to fascistic political parties that seek to undermine and manipulate democracy, liberal antifascists call for public education to dissuade voters from supporting these policies, or the strengthening of legal and constitutional protections for minorities.

The general belief is that fascism is one variety of totalitarianism, which seeks to replace liberal capitalism with a state-run tyranny. Liberals see this threat as coming from both the extreme right (fascism) and the extreme left (communism).

Liberal antifascism is typically worried about the paradox of tolerance: Within this worldview, a democratic liberal society must tolerate political views and even parties and movements that it finds fundamentally objectionable, but to do so can leave it open to being usurped and supplanted by those same forces.

Liberal antifascism can often include a deep personal dedication to reason, ethics, and justice, rather than collective action, and indeed collective action can often chafe against liberals’ individualism.

There tends to be a strong belief that the tools to fight totalitarianism exist within the scope of liberal democracies: A free and open press offers a venue to defeat totalitarianism in the so-called marketplace of ideas; Laws can be written to permit freedom of speech, association, and politics that also offer tools to punish and prohibit hate speech or prevent subversive activity; Police may be allowed to spy on, infiltrate, and disrupt dissident groups that threaten the liberal order. On the left wing of liberal antifascism, social welfare and moderate wealth redistribution programs can be offered that mitigate the alienation and inequality that breed the kinds of resentments that attract people to totalitarian tendencies. On the right wing of liberalism, fascism is seen as emerging from amorality, political corruption, and as a regrettable reaction to the fast pace of change, or as a response to the alleged puritanism of the left.

the values and virtues of liberalism had already been fundamentally and fatally wounded by capitalism long before fascism arrived on the scene to deal the coup de grâce.

There is important work to be done from this approach. The minoritized people and communities that fascists target can sometimes benefit from the protection of the liberal framework of human rights and the law (especially if they are middle class), if only because, in the absence of them, fascism is free to unleash unrestrained terror.

While schools and universities have never been radical institutions and often reproduce dominant power relations, the fact that they are constantly targeted by fascists reveals that they are an important battleground where forms of democratic literacy can be fostered and where expansive understandings of the world that are not allergic to complexity and ambiguity can grow.

Liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law may largely function to create the illusion of democracy while preserving what is functionally a capitalist oligarchy, but their absence is extremely dangerous.

Institutions of the free press and civil discourse have been undermined by the utterly cynical manipulation of reality by corporations through advertising, lobbying, and punitive lawfare, and the corporate ownership of newspapers and other news and publishing venues. But it’s hard to say that these should be abandoned when compared to the naked lies of the fascist flex, where conspicuously bending reality in plain sight and viciously transgressing the norms of basic human decency is a kind of top-down propaganda of deed.

But as has been pointed out many times before, the values and virtues of liberalism had already been fundamentally and fatally wounded by capitalism long before fascism arrived on the scene to deal the coup de grâce. A system ruled by money and that serves the interests of the ruling class means that those with wealth and power constantly dodge the law, corrupt the media, game democracy, and sabotage education. This is done in plain sight, and in fact, observing this cynical manipulation has been key to the success of fascists in the twenty-first century.

There is a strong critique of the liberal approach from socialist antifascists.

In the first place, these critics rightly note that, even admitting the authoritarian history of socialist and communist regimes in the twentieth century, it is bogus and manipulative to frame both fascism and socialism as totalitarianism. Socialism is, in general, a project of human liberation and the empowerment of the downtrodden, whereas fascism is a project that reduces to the worship of power—conflating the two is analytically and critically specious and serves largely to justify the hallucinatory “middle” position of liberalism itself.

Relatedly, liberal antifascism generally ignores the many ways that liberal capitalist systems, even when democratic, have historically required and created pockets of fascism within them as discussed above in the analysis of “latent fascism” earlier this chapter. These include institutions like prisons and the fascist regimes tolerated or actively supported overseas.

Socialist antifascists also correctly recognize that, as I have also argued throughout this book, fascism is, unlike other manifestations of tyranny or authoritarianism in world history, a form that emerges uniquely within and presents itself as a response to capitalism. And indeed, such critics rightly point out that fascism offers false (usually violent) solutions to the crises and contradictions of capitalism, for example, when they propose to fix the problems of labor mobility, surplussed populations, and labor markets through evicting, punishing, or otherwise conspicuously abusing “foreigners”.

Socialist antifascists note that fascism frequently grows out of and manipulates liberal ideology and concerns, as for example when “the rule of law,” the rights of individuals, or concern for the vitality of free markets are cited as reasons why fascism must be imposed. Indeed, fascism frequently succeeds in inheriting and appropriating the repressive state apparatus created by liberal administrations, including the surveillance, police, and censorious power allegedly first intended in part to defend liberal institutions from the threat of fascist insurgency.

Socialist antifascists also point to the vivid example of Weimar Germany or the Spanish Civil War to show why liberal antifascism tends to (or is doomed to) fail to recognize the threat of fascism before it’s too late and the way fascism is able to build a cross-class alliance to overpower and subjugate liberal democracies. Yet well before seizing power, fascism and fascistic politics begins to transform liberal institutions, from parliamentary debate to the free press to the courtroom, into theaters to demonstrate to the public these institutions’ incapacity to deal with real crises.

Liberal antifascists are all too willing to appease fascists by swerving to the right (for example, by cutting social welfare programs or attacking immigration) under the tragically mistaken impression that this will deprive fascism of its supporters (in fact, it typically emboldens them)

Socialist antifascists observe that liberal antifascists are all too willing to appease fascists by swerving to the right (for example, by cutting social welfare programs or attacking immigration) under the tragically mistaken impression that this will deprive fascism of its supporters (in fact, it typically emboldens them). They point out that, historically, liberals have been more than willing to exclude, jeopardize, and even murder the Left, rather than make the kinds of alliances that could actually defeat fascism—as, for example, occurred in the famous case of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Sparticists as well as throughout the “Middle East,” where liberal Western governments supported the rise of political Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against rising pan-Arab socialism.

For socialist many critics, liberalism and fascism are not fundamentally opposed but represent two rival orientations of the ruling class as they struggle, materially and ideologically, to fix or displace the crises capitalism has generated.

However, such an analysis tends to point in only one direction: Antifascism from a socialist perspective is, by and large, just socialism. The (correct) analysis that fascism emerges from and that promises a false solution to the crises of capitalism in most cases leads to the conclusion that the capitalist must be abolished to eliminate the threat. While socialists have proposed and undertaken “united front” and “popular front” alliances with liberals, these have, by and large, been a means to an end, aimed at stopping fascism from obtaining or wielding real political power and also at offering an opportunity for socialist mobilization, recruitment, and organizing the objective of which is, ultimately, to in some way (democratically through insurgency or otherwise) replace liberal capitalism.

Antiauthoritarians accuse socialist antifascists of a politics of expedience, citing for example Stalin’s strategy in the Spanish Civil War, which many argue sacrificed the anarchist and radical elements of the Republic in favour of expanding his power.

My conclusion is that there is something fundamentally right about the socialist position. The contradictions of capitalism throw that system into constant crisis. Competition between capitalists at the level of the firm, the sector, or the nation means that capitalism cannot solve its own problems. These crises simply get displaced to vulnerable populations or must be resolved through destruction and war. Even though capitalism is inherently a system of free-market competition and exploitation, we can observe historically and show theoretically that at specific moments, capitalism breeds within itself fascist leaders and tendencies that promise to save the system from itself.

If capitalism is allowed to persist, it will not only exhaust the resources of the planet in its endless drive for profit (and perpetuate unimaginable human and nonhuman misery); it will also breed within itself forms of fascism that promise false and violent solutions to these crises or that transparently promise to protect and enrich a chosen people at the expense of others. Any truly antifascist project then must necessarily be anti-capitalist.

There is a familiar liberal critique here that emanates from a paranoia about totalitarianism: Socialists are merely opportunistically seizing the antifascist struggle to smuggle in and impose their own form of totalitarian rule. Whatever kernel of truth this may draw on, more accurately and significantly articulated by antiauthoritarian antifascists.

These have typically been associated with anarchist or autonomist tendencies on the left that tend to agree with a socialist critique of liberalism and capitalism but distrust the tendencies within socialism toward centralization, planning, and control and have, instead, prioritized grassroots mobilization on the level of community, based on the understanding that fascism takes root in the interface between communities and individuals.

Accordingly, antiauthoritarian antifascists have tended to focus their efforts on building the capacities of communities, as small as a neighbourhood or as large as a region, to develop forms of mutual aid, self-defence, self-sufficiency, and grassroots power. Antiauthoritarian antifascists tend to see fascism as a poisonous outgrowth of (and response to) capitalism but also see the state itself as an overarching authoritarian apparatus and (rightly) note the link between of state institutions like militaries, police, and prisons and fascist ideology (and recruitment). They are sceptical and often (rightly) fearful of socialist claims that the apparatus of the state can be seized and wielded against capitalism and fascism, pointing to a long history of authoritarian socialism.

Further, antiauthoritarian antifascists are also keener to observe and confront the way fascism is embedded in the forms of subjectivity, identity, and relationality that emerge under regimes of inequality, arguing that the fight against microfascism must also include a struggle at the level of community relations and everyday life against patriarchy, nationalism, religious dogma, and other modes of domination.

Often this includes a priority on living an “antifascist life” in common and trying to build communities, institutions, and ways of being that are not held in place or that normalize violence, domination, and authority.

The fight against microfascism must also include a struggle at the level of community relations and everyday life against patriarchy, nationalism, religious dogma, and other modes of domination. Often this includes a priority on living an “antifascist life” in common and trying to build communities, institutions, and ways of being that are not held in place or that normalize violence, domination, and authority.

Antiauthoritarian antifascist praxis tends to be the least institutional, and has given us the “antifa” set of tactics and strategies that revolve around a direct surveillance of and confrontation with fascist organizers at the level of the neighbourhood. These have often included the use of violence to defend people targeted by fascists or to disrupt spaces where fascists congregate, organize, and recruit.

But while these conspicuous antifascist tactics receive a great deal of attention and infamy (from liberals for being transgressive of the rule of law and the norms of tolerance; from socialists for lacking an overall strategy for revolutionary change), antifa is, as numerous authors note, actually far more concerned with a slower form of community organizing and societal transformation: squatting or collectivizing housing, providing direct support to those affected by border regimes, cooking and distributing food, and doing the work of allowing communities to be less reliant on carceral and authoritarian institutions by, for example, building capacity for the abolition of prisons and police and the arrival of transformative justice.

The gambit here is that communities that are highly organized around and sustained by solidarity, mutual aid, real diversity, and truly radical politics are much more resilient to the seductions of fascism and can be the bedrock on which a nonauthoritarian socialism might be built.

The critique of this approach is that it often lacks a capacity for and an interest in an overarching strategy for changing society. The focus on grassroots and community struggles often comes at the expense of a plan to overhaul the economy and redefine politics on a larger scale. The risk is that these kinds of approaches leave the terrain of the state and of politics at large to a fight between liberals and fascists, which at best pulls the state rightward and at worst results in murderous regimes.

Liberals might argue that antiauthoritarians’ rejection of the legal system and conventional democratic institutions risks contributing to the cynicism that emboldens fascists, and that antiauthoritarians use of antifascist violence scares and alienates many people, who may turn to fascism for protection.

Further, we live in a world today where not all of the problems we face can be solved at the level of community: The climate crisis, for one, but also the broader question of how technologies should develop, including so-called artificial intelligence, biomedical progress, space travel, etc. If capitalism now operates internationally, with huge corporations having the power to simply move themselves to places where state regulation or community power is weaker, then it is hard to see how community-level organizing could meaningfully confront and overcome it. And the examples of history as well as our own moment reveal that no matter how resilient a community may be, if fascists gain access to the incredibly powerful technologically augmented military powers of the state, they likely have the capacity to crush even the most embedded forms of local resistance and solidarity.

We might observe that the three approaches to antifascism offered here have perspectives and priorities aligned with the three aspects of the riddle of the fascist sphinx: the manifest, the latent, and the micro.

Liberal antifascism is largely concerned with the manifest appearance of fascism in the form or explicit fascist parties or tendencies or the implicit fascism of reactionary and far-right groups who might take offense at being called fascist but nonetheless essentially are. The liberal antifascist strategy is to bolster and mobilize liberal democratic institutions to reduce the chance of fascist success.

Meanwhile, a socialist antifascism is obviously not ignorant of the threat of manifest fascism, but also attendant to what is inconvenient for liberals: the way manifest fascism emerges and takes strength from a latent fascism that always already exists within the liberal capitalist order, both in the form of fascistic institutions (like prisons, the police, and the corporation) and enclaves (fascist regimes within the dominant capitalist “peace”) and also in terms of how capitalism’s contradictions and crises produce the conditions in which fascism emerges.

By contrast, antiauthoritarian antifascism tends to focus on the level of microfascism: the roots of fascism in patriarchy, coercive sovereignty, authoritarian social relations, and institutions, subjectivity, and everyday life.

And yet, as the contributors to a recent collection of essays on For Antifascist Futures contend, the three paradigms of antifascism I have elaborated here miss something vitally important about fascism and antifascism when they (typically) fail to contend with the histories of imperialism, colonialism, and the formation of racial regimes. These authors work in a tradition given its most famous expression by the Martinican poet, surrealist, philosopher, and politician Aimé Césaire (1972, 36) in his 1950 Discours sur le Colonialisme, in which he enjoins that

the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [colonized non-Europeans].

In this tradition, numerous authors have observed that a strict definition of fascism based on the famous German, Italian, and Japanese regimes of the twentieth century misguides us in several ways: It fails to recognize that these regimes and many of their protagonists emerged from the crucible of colonialism and imperialism and continued its work; that the same seeds of ruling-class- sponsored racist tyranny were and are germinating in other ways within non-fascist “democratic” countries; and that, from the perspective of many peoples around the world who find themselves on the wrong side of what W. E. B. DuBois called the global colour line, fascism is not a break with but a continuation of business as usual—only now it is applied to people who once imagined themselves immune.

Within this view, antifascism cannot be complete unless it also contends with the way capitalist racial regimes conscript the imagination and the interests of preferred racial subjects modelled on white supremacy. (White supremacy and its underlying logic of racial hierarchy serves as a model here for forms of fascism not directly articulated around whiteness, such as Hindutva in India). Capitalism has always secured its reproduction through the creation of racial hierarchies, and fascism is an amplification of these underlying structural tendencies. This means paying close attention to the way these regimes express themselves in terms of the establishment and maintenance of borders, of criminalization, incarceration, and punishment, and of the self-deputization of racially empowered subjects who form unsanctioned but highly useful militias, patrols, lynch mobs, and other formations that are the vanguard of fascistic politics.

Accordingly, antifascism must mean decolonization, anti-imperialism, and a commitment to a form of anti-racist protagonism. This must include a recognition that racialized people have been forced to undertake antifascist work for a very long time in the name of survival. Sometimes this work includes the formal political organization suggested by socialist antifascists. Sometimes it includes the kind of street-level community defence often associated with antiauthoritarian antifascism. But it also includes a tradition of transformative community organizing that is focused on keeping people safe from both organized racists and from the state, the police, and other liberal institutions.

For example, the Black radical tradition of prison abolition reframes the prison-industrial complex as an incipient fascist institution at the heart of the American colonial-settler state, one whose influence reaches beyond the prison walls and reshapes the racial capitalist order, with dire ideological consequences: It habituates people to imagine that police, prisons, and punishment are the solutions to violence and harm (even to fascism), inclining them toward authoritarianism. The abolitionist practice, however, is not only one of political agitation to defund and close carceral institutions; it is also subtended by grassroots action to create meaningful and holistic forms of autonomous community safety and power.

Importantly, for anticolonial antifascists, solidarity is a key practice, in the first place to overcome the racialized, class, and other divisions on which racial capitalism depends and on which fascism capitalizes, in the second place to build grassroots and political power for community defence and revolutionary change, and to be able to understand the complex confluences of fascisms in the plural.

From this view, fascisms should not be strictly defined but recognized as a shared enemy that appears differently in different struggles. This would enable transformative solidarities between, for example, Indigenous nations fighting fascism in the guise of extractive corporations and their police and private security henchmen, urban Black organizers against police violence for whom fascism wears blue and has a badge, and queer and trans people and their allies, who see fascism mobilizing in the violent reinforcement of allegedly traditional gender norms.

This last example highlights that, as Ewa Majewska observes, feminism is “a core position” against fascism as gendered biopolitical rule. In this sense, antifascism must be about more than the (liberal) strengthening of democratic institutions, the (socialist) struggle to euthanize capitalism (fascism’s host), and the (antiauthoritarian) inclination toward street-level community defence; it must also mean “resisting patriarchal, racist, heteronormative capitalism every day” and recognizing how pivotal anti-feminist, anti-trans, natalist, and demographic rhetorics have been to the rise of twenty-first century fascistic politics in various places around the world. It is also key to understanding how these fascisms collaborate, despite major ideological differences.

Majewska is also among those who note that antifascism must include a much more profound transformation of agency, subjectivity, relationality, and desire, which has been at the core of the feminist project for decades. This process is deeply entangled with efforts to transversally break down the artificial barriers that capitalist patriarchy has always relied upon and that fascistic politics rallies around, between public and private, male and female, domestic and foreign, and so on, and in such work, the antifascist protagonism of trans people has been singularly important.