Breaking Down the Assault on Antifa

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HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


 

Violence is the great obfuscator. When its name is invoked by the powerful, rest assured that it is masking much more than it reveals. While it is presented as an objective description of a state of affairs requiring immediate condemnation, it simultaneously serves to discredit movements and ideas, deny the political agency of certain actors, and cloak brutal forms of domination. Its purportedly objective presentation is, in fact, a legerdemain that stirs up moral sentiments in order to muddy political analysis. Under the guise of indubitable moral rectitude, the world is turned upside: those who stand up for justice are often made to appear as senseless savages, and the greatest perpetrators of violence are exonerated, or even presented as victims.

Of late, violence has made headlines in the U.S. corporate media by serving to discredit the work of anti-fascist activists and distract from the actual threats of fascism and white supremacy. One would think that the very expression “anti-fascism” would immediately convoke pledges of allegiance in a country whose nationalist narratives include the story of its own rise to power as the global hegemon through the militant defeat of fascism in WWII. Regardless of whether or not we sanction its veracity, the story of the violent fight against fascism—not with kicks and punches, but with bombers, tanks, heavy artillery and nuclear bombs—is, indeed, one of the founding narratives of contemporary America.

However, in the current political climate, innumerable spin-doctors, corporate-funded pundits, and even supposed leftists are intent on misrepresenting and discrediting antifascism with their sweeping and self-congratulatory denunciations of the “violence” of antifa activists. Rhetorically, they do this through a series of elisions and obfuscations. For rockhillcounterhone, they sever contemporary antifa movements from the long history and deep ideological commitments of anti-fascism. They aggressively misrepresent activists mobilized in defense of equality and justice as nothing more than savage progenitors of violence, obfuscating the fundamental political stakes of the movement, as well as the vast array of its activities. It should come as no surprise that this is occurring precisely at the moment when racist, xenophobic, and fascist ideologies are gaining institutional power and seeking greater normalization in U.S. political culture (indeed,

To take but one glaring example, the dominant mass media image of antifa has recently been consolidated by Chris Hedges, who has indisputably demonstrated that public figures associated with the Left can sometimes serve the agenda of the Right better than their own foot soldiers. From a privileged vantage point far removed from the violence enacted by white supremacists, Hedges peremptorily proclaimed that antifascist direct action that openly confronts fascist violence is nothing but the mirror of the latter. In one grandiose and historically inaccurate claim after the next, he levels the variegated and heterogeneous social phenomenon of antifa, patronizingly flattens the political agency of all of the different actors involved, collapses the colossal difference between fighting for fascism and struggling for freedom and equality, and crushes an entire field of political struggle in order to make it fit neatly within his simple moral categories.


Hedges' sanctimonious hectoring of left activists willing to confront ultra-rightwingers is hardly helpful. The man speaks often like a radical but his temperament is clearly liberal. And his stubborn anti-communism is also something that needs examination. Ironically, Hedges has even written books (Death of the Liberal Class), berating liberals for their obstructionism and uselessness. Not strong on introspection, apparently.

This rhetorical leveling of antifa by the reckless moral bulldozer of a right-minded leftist, which has been resolutely criticized by John-Patrick Schultz and others, exemplifies one of the key tactics used to discredit dissent in general, which consists in smothering its political claims under the the scarlet letter of “violence.” When people who are oppressed and vulnerable resist domination and assert their political agency, it often takes forms that do not follow the protocols so cherished by the liberals and conservatives in power, precisely because the system that supports them works to kettle the agency of those below. The powerful and their lackeys use this as evidence to assert that dissenters are illegitimate, uncivil, and ultimately savage. Out of control and ungovernable, they need to be forcefully trained to obey the civilizing moral compass that only the Right, and right-minded leftists, can provide. This obviously does not imply, by contrast, that we are obliged to indiscriminately condone everyone and everything affiliated with antifa. It simply means that we need to train ourselves to see through the numerous tactics employed to discredit it across the board and ignore its political stakes.

In the face, then, of this contemporary restaging of the savage and the civilized, which is viciously intent on transforming a complex political struggle into a simple moral opposition, it is important to remind ourselves of a few basic things. First of all, as the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook has cogently explained in a recent interview, antifa is rooted in a century-long battle against the fascism that rose and spread in interwar Europe by using the parliamentary system and many of the very same protocols defended by so many liberals and conservatives today. It is part of a vast historical power struggle over the very meaning of politics, and it stalwartly resists the assumption that those who are violently dedicated to destroying certain sectors of the population are simply expressing an opinion that should be respected or tolerated. These are precisely the views that were at the root of some of the most ruthless and destructive political regimes of the last century, including the Nazi Third Reich and the bloody dictatorships of Franco and Mussolini.



One of the important fronts of the current anti-fascist struggles concerns the horizons of political acceptability. Empowered by a state apparatus that has proven time and again that it has their backs, fascists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are on the attack (and receiving ample funding from reactionaries, as well as extensive media coverage). They are rabidly intent on expanding the field of political acceptability to include them, perniciously attempting to co-opt and operationalize principles of “free speech,” “civil discourse,” and “tolerance” for their own ends. It is precisely in this context, and against a historical backdrop in which liberal tolerance and the parliamentary system did little or nothing to stop the rise of fascism in the interwar period, that activists are putting their own bodies on the line to expunge fascism’s extreme violence from the field of political possibility before its roots spread even deeper.

We should never forget, then, that antifa is a struggle against the violence of fascism. Those militating for white supremacy and Nazism, as well as those standing on the sidelines waving the banner of their own moral superiority while they promote “non-violent” tolerance of the opinion of those whose kin have built gas chambers and run lynching campaigns, are fighting for the right to establish or militate for a system founded on the most extreme forms of systemic violence. Rather than people who wear black, hide their faces from the oppressive surveillance state, or put their own lives at risk to protect others (such as Cornel West and other threatened activists in Charlottesville), why aren’t the fascists—as well as those defending their right to push on others the “opinion” that swaths of the population should be decimated—identified as the violent ones?

One reason is that systems of domination do everything in their power to render their own violence invisible, in part through the hyper-visibilization of any significant resistance to it, which is precisely what is labeled as “violent.” Self-appointed moral referees like Hedges falsely presume that the term “violence” simply refers to an objective fact rather than operating as an ideological tool used to discredit dissent. They believe, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, that the Right and the corporate media and state apparatus—with all of their well-paid specialists in smear campaigns, public lies, infiltration, and false flag operations—would simply respect some ephemeral “moral authority” of the Left if the latter never engaged in activities that they identify as violent.

To take but one of the most flagrant examples of why this is utterly incorrect, let us recall the FBI’s position on the most outspoken defender of non-violent resistance to white supremacy in the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. Two days after the peaceful March on Washington and his uplifting “I Have a Dream” speech, the head of the domestic intelligence division, William Sullivan, summed up the FBI’s stance in a memo to top bureau leaders, and later wrote an anonymous letter to King trying to blackmail him into committing suicide: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

The notion of violence operates, perhaps first and foremost, as an instrument of perception management. It serves to organize a political playing field in such a way that certain movements and figures are delegitimated, and particular tactics are taken away from the oppressed, while the repressive strategies of those in power are legitimated, naturalized and ideally rendered invisible. The corporate state and their pawns in the media and elsewhere thereby seek to establish and maintain a monopoly on invisible violence.

One crucial question in this regard is why the conversation about violence that is continually re-staged in the media overwhelmingly focuses on tactics of resistance by the underclasses. Among those who are vociferously proclaiming a pure form of “non-violence” as an unquestionable moral principle, who of them is arguing that this principle should be applied to the corporate state and all of its imperial endeavors? Alongside the countless statements reprimanding anti-capitalist activists for street scuffles, where are the articles calling for the dismantling of the military-industrial complex, the dissolution of the police force, or the abolition of the prison system? Why isn’t the debate around non-violence centered precisely on those who have all of the power and all of the weapons? Is it because violence has actually worked successfully in these cases to impose a very specific top-down agenda, which includes shutting out anyone who calls it into question, and diligently managing the perception of their actions? Is violence somehow acceptable here because it is the violence of the victors, who are the ones who presume to have the right—and in any case have the power—to define the very nature of violence (as anything that threatens them)?

Clearly, the fetishization of non-violence is reserved for the actions of the underlings. They are the ones who, again and again, are told that they must be civil (and are never sufficiently so), and that the best way to attain their objectives is by obeying the moral dictates of those above. Let us recall, in this light, James Baldwin’s powerful statementin the context of the black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s: “The only time non-violence is admired is when the Negroes practice it.”

It is time, then, for us to get violence. We need to figure out how it functions and the work that it does as a practical concept to orchestrate a field of political possibility, distribute tactics, legitimate or discredit movements, render particular actions visible or invisible, and ultimately define the very nature of what is politically acceptable. This will allow us to refuse the handcuffs of the oppressive moralism that shackles agents with the inchoate question: “violence or non-violence?” Throwing off these shackles, and the assumption that there are two purely delimited forms of action between which we must choose once and for all regardless of circumstances (including those of self-defense), we should instead be engaged in a much broader and deeper inquiry, which the latter question seeks to obfuscate: what are we to do with the deadly white supremacist, capitalist empire at this precise historical moment when it is emboldening its most fascist elements, and how can we make sense of the ways in which it operationalizes “violence” to simultaneously stigmatize resistance and perpetuate its monopoly on invisible violence? We really need to get violence. We need to understand it and wrest control of it away from those who marshal it—under so many different guises and with such force—against us. 


About the Author
 Ramona E. Durán is a writer, scholar and educator. She has recently been involved with launching the Radical Education Department (RED), an autonomous collective dedicated to the construction of a radical internationalist Left through direct action education.

Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, and he is one of the co-founders of the Radical Education Department (RED). Follow on twitter: @GabrielRockhill 

To take but one glaring example, the dominant mass media image of antifa has recently been consolidated by Chris Hedges, who has indisputably demonstrated that public figures associated with the Left can sometimes serve the agenda of the Right better than their own foot soldiers. From a privileged vantage point far removed from the violence enacted by white supremacists, Hedges peremptorily proclaimed that antifascist direct action that openly confronts fascist violence is nothing but the mirror of the latter.

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BONUS FEATURE

“Breaching the Liberal Illusion: Against Hedges” – JPS

Antifa confronts liberalism with a dilemma. Again and again, liberal pundits have rejected antifa for violence. And yet after the antifa coalition’s disruption of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Donald Trump used precisely the liberal refrain against antifa as a way to shield and legitimize white supremacy. The reactionary force of the liberal refrain should make us profoundly suspicious of it.  And yet we are witnessing something like the opposite.  

Untroubled by their strange bedfellow, liberals echo Trump’s condemnation of “both sides.” Chris Hedges’ recent article in Truthdig is only one among a number of these echoes.  Hedges calls for the left to reject both white supremacists and antifa as fringe, extremist groups that are identical in their fetishization of violence.  This is a narrative that refuses to see the real conditions that antifa faces. In doing so, it bolsters the reactionary agenda.

Hedges’ essay must first be rejected for its method. Its analysis boldly refusal to consider anything so mundane as historical detail. This approach leads to a series of sloppy comparisons drawn from a bewildering array of eras and contexts. One wonders: were the activists who recently protected unarmed clergywomen and -men from racists holding torches in Charlottesville quite the same as paramilitary communists in Weimar Germany during the 1920s? In fact, should we really dismiss all militant resistance to the rise of National Socialism and its genocidal project in interwar Germany, as Hedges seems to do?  The assertions he makes about Latin American revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence should alarm anyone familiar with this history and reveal the functionality of his argument for justifying right-wing violence. For example, the comparisons he draws between left-wing revolutionary organizations and right-wing death squads backed by an authoritarian state, as well as the power of the global imperial hegemon, have not only been widely refuted in Latin American contexts, but recognized for their function as apologias for state terrorism and political genocide.

Hedges’ method also leads him to dramatic, sweeping claims that show a similar disrespect for history and detail. Antifa is, at bottom, a pure lust for violence.  Pay no attention to the actual, highly nuanced arguments made by participants, or to the fact that antifa is a broad coalition that harbors a wide range of views and practices.  When the movement wears black, it embodies “the color of death.”  No need to consider the history of the anarchist use of the color black (in its flag, for example), or the tactical value of dressing in identical, nondescript clothes as a tool for coordinating and remaining anonymous.

This superficial method grounds the article’s glaring failures. Hedges’ argument rests in large part on this claim:

“The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed.”

We are told the primary social issues at play are political and economic; the racial hatred clear in Charlottesville and the Trump administration is secondary. This approach is tactically disastrous.  Are we to think that treating white supremacy as secondary will help build lasting, vibrant, mass coalitions with which to oppose Trump? Doesn’t this in fact stand opposed to some of the most important, powerful, and broad-based struggles today that see race as a central issue?

But Hedges is not making a merely tactical mistake.  White supremacy is not simply an extremist stance taken by those lacking a political voice and experiencing economic hardship.   A recent preliminary study suggests that Trump voters were concerned more with racial concerns than economic ones. Moreover, we live in a country founded by wealthy men who were eminently politically enfranchised (they built the very structures of American government) and who thought little of slavery or the mass eradication of indigenous peoples and cultures. Christopher Patrella notes that the Ku Klux Klan “were the well-educated elites of their day.” The spokespeople of white supremacy–the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example–were cultural and economic elites. They framed racist ideology as a “science,” aiming to prove the natural inferiority of nonwhites.  This tradition is unbroken.  It is carried on today by “scientific” frauds like the eugenicist academic Charles Murray.  

Frantz Fanon’s work shows, again and again, that white supremacy isn’t simply a fringe belief held by the desperate. It stands at the core of the western world’s dominant conception of order, beauty, and harmony. White supremacy is essential to how this country–though certainly not only this country–operates. It shapes how wealth, prestige, and rights are distributed; who occupies the positions of highest authority; and who may be murdered without legal consequence.

The article’s ultimate failure lies in its inability to see the centrality and enormity of the problem of white supremacy. Hedges argues that force must not be used to disrupt and defend against ever bolder fascists and white supremacists. According to this account, if we don’t challenge them, we’re safe. It is astonishing that Hedges, who sees in white supremacists a “lust for violence,” never considers the possibility that vulnerable communities will be increasingly targeted by a radical right made bolder by a society that respects their toxic ideology as a legitimate point of view.  More importantly, despite his avowed suspicion of American government, Hedges refuses to acknowledge that white supremacy structures and is actively and passively cultivated by the state, which thereby encourages the violent domination of minorities. Indeed, Hedges seems to harbor an unspoken faith that the state will serve as a neutral bulwark against the expansion of racist violence; things will not be allowed to get out of hand, if we just let the racists have their say. The police–no neutral force–are giving free reign to the radical right while cracking down on antifa, as seen in Boston and Charlottesville. Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio signals his support for white supremacy, as did his delay in condemning both the Ku Klux Klan during his presidential campaign and white supremacists after Charlottesville. The president is vowing to restart the flood of military weapons into local police, equipment that fueled the obscene state response to uprisings in Ferguson. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has thrown his support behind mass incarceration. Again and again, the president has encouraged the extra-legal use of violence against activists.

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Unsurprisingly, this context has given rise to an increase of racially motivated violence. Indeed, when the government supports and protects white supremacist violence by the rank-and-file, one finds not only increasing attacks on vulnerable communities, but also a transformation of the legal structure. In Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the repeated outbreak of neo-Nazi violence, to which the state turned a blind eye, drove the passage of anti-immigration laws.[1]

Hedges’ condemnation of antifa amounts to a refusal to grapple with these conditions in the naive faith that, if we simply leave the radical right alone, they will go away. It is in this context that we must understand antifa. It is not the “mirror” of an extremist fringe of the right. It is the clear recognition of, and an attempt to challenge and transform, a terrifying situation that Hedges refuses to see.

[1] Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland; Edinburgh: AK Press, 161.

 

Appendix

CLICK HERE TO READ THE RED ALERT MANIFESTO

“RED Alert Manifesto” – RD & GR

The Radical Education Department is an autonomous collective dedicated to the construction of a radical internationalist Left through the training and federation of its cultural warriors. We assert these principles to be the worthiest of being put to the test of collective mobilization:

  1. Despite their insidious claims to independent neutrality, cultural and educational institutions serve to reproduce socio-economic hierarchies and constitute crucial battlefields for the perpetuation or transformation of relations of power.
  2. The dominant educational system indoctrinates and dominates by
    • mis-educating the general public and imposing disempowering worldviews;
    • transforming individuals into vocational cogs in the capitalist apparatus;
    • stratifying the population through institutionalized class warfare, which is often rendered invisible via myths of meritocracy;
    • providing credentials and intellectual cover for worldwide capitalist oppression, as well as its technocratic, fascist, and racist apologists;
    • providing research and development for the lucrative business of war and ecological destruction;
    • privatizing knowledge and subjecting it to a competitive exchange economy; and
    • purposely misdirecting intellectual labor power or hitching it to the wagon of academic bureaucracies and market imperatives.

It is therefore necessary to re-educate ourselves regarding its sordid histories, social functions, and contemporary struggles.

  1. Wresting control over knowledge production from the corporate elite entails transforming extant institutions, producing counter-institutions, and engaging in radical modes of guerilla education and cultural training both within and beyond academic walls.
  2. Struggles against the exploitation, bureaucratization, and vocationalization of academic labor are at the forefront of the battle over knowledge power.
  3. Against the private property regimes imposed on knowledge production by capital and its bureaucratic administrators, the radicalization of education requires socializing and collectivizing both the process of producing knowledge and its products.
  4. Transforming extant cultural and educational institutions necessitates direct actions that contest the policed hierarchies operative within them, not falling prey to the ideological traps set by fascists and their liberal apologists, if these be so-called civil discourse, fair and balanced debates, free speech or other such shibboleths for power.
  5. Whereas the military-industrial-academic complex has militant capitalist elites lavishly funding research and development efforts for global warfare, reactionary think tanks and pseudo-intellectual ideologues, research collaboratives of and for the radical Left create communities of alternative education that seek to benefit all by providing verifiable–rather than ideological–accounts of history and social life around the globe, as well as mobilizing knowledge for egalitarian and emancipatory ends.
  6. Part of the project of radical education is learning and teaching the long and deep histories of left struggles around the world, including those around education, particularly because these battles have often been banished from the historical record.
  7. Recognizing the reactionaries’ strategy of divide and conquer, the project of radicalizing education works to federate across struggles, including across the geographic and ideological span of the global Left, which positions itself, by definition, against capitalism.
  8. These tactics must be mobilized for the overall strategy of constructing and strengthening an egalitarian, anticolonial, ecological, anti-patriarchal and internationalist Left.

We issue this RED alert as a wake-up call to the necessity of collectively re-educating ourselves and taking action to create another world, which is not only possible, but absolutely necessary.

– RD & GR,
Founding Members of the Radical Education Department 




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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 

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