Commitment to freedom of speech is a weighty political litmus test for liberalism—libertarians and anarchists often engage with radical liberalism’s awesome propensity towards freedom. However, within the anarchist and anti-fascist locus there is an intense scrutiny of liberal ideals, a sentiment which grows seemingly in proportion with alt-right publicity.

I commend libertarian thinkers for generally hosting good discussion and framing about how to discern legitimate threats of violence vs maintaining a commitment towards freedom of expression and open discourse, so I won’t try and navigate the precise ethics of when violence can be justified in the cause of anti-fascist action, nor the paradox of tolerance, nor make a rights claim for liberal speech norms.

Although I’m not currently taking classes, I live in a college town where I recently attended for a few years which involved many years of activism under various banners and continues to elicit my engagement: libertarian, feminist, anti-racist, anarchist with S4SS, and otherwise. College campuses ideally provide a unique and dynamic platform for young minds to be challenged as new thoughts shape actions and new actions shape thought. This places the campus as a premier locus for raising new generations to hold values we deem correct.

As a general rule, I regard discourse as a foundational value for a free and socially capable society. So long as rights are not being violated, speech remains a powerful tool for communication of values. Suppressing competition in the realm of ideas likely would lead to the best ideas not being able to gain their deserved social share, and isolation of bad ideas renders them to fester into even worse ones. Those regularly engaged in politics probably can note the alienating feeling of entering an echo chamber belonging to a group you’re not familiar with. Different contexts give new meaning to words, complicating the communication of ideas. Without having to be challenged, you’re less likely to be correct, and the more likely you are to have a hard time effectively reaching broad audiences and to break out of echo chambers.

Having aligned with groups on campus broadly seen as “leftist” in aims of social justice, I’ve been made aware of the intense institutional uphill battles that the marginalized face, and witnessed all too many losing interpersonal battles. Fighting the dominant power system leaves you vulnerable and under the false guise of the mistaken moderate liberal idea that ‘equal protection of the law’ can be achieved in a fundamentally unjust society, it seems that any new legal avenue to enforce restrictions on individual action will almost certainly skew in favor of the existing schema. Any calls for a net increase in statism such as laws suppressing allowable speech are antithetical to anarchist praxis. When our government is still beholden to power, do not give them any tools to oppress.

As a grounding example of theory, I recall protests against Richard Spencer’s visit to our campus last December. Protests were lively, with minimal arrests. The main injuries were from police violence, the most serious being a concussion caused by the butt of a shotgun to a dear friend’s skull who was peacefully protesting fascists who were being protected by State Troopers. Ultimately, I had a few main takeaways from my role as an organizer: protests attract people from all over. You cannot plan what will happen in a chaotic environment, only minimize harm as it spontaneously arises. Most of this harm involved the interjection of police which elevates state violence to becoming an inescapable reality. Lastly, high pressure scenarios like protests give way to more desperate and impulsive action than might occur in other arenas.

Recalling the ongoing paradox of tolerance, we can think strategically about violence and the role of police in activism. As cultural wars intensify, police presence increases undeniably. While tepid moderates try to gain mass appeal through co-opting a non-violent and non-radical aesthetic, riot shields will increasingly separate the involved marginalized masses fighting for their vision. The typical tactics of anti-fascist movements must be called in: are loud protests, violence, and leftist organizing capable of achieving anything more than giving the state more power and the police more chances to cause harm?

Black-bloc clad persons of all stripes showed to our protests, generally from the communist, socialist, or anarchist milieu, making an incredible show of force. Though they did not make up the majority of protesters by any means, their impressive display of USSR, red, and/or anarchist flags could not be ignored. This seems to have been a critical first exposure to radical leftist ideology for a lot of millennials who were previously uninitiated to protest culture. This gives the impression that the protests were much more radical than the average of its constituents, whilst contributing to a high emotion environment.

While I am pretty connected to and generally appreciative of anti-fascist action networks, some of the militancy in those circles seems to feed into fascists’ hands by allowing them to look like the victim of “wild communists seeking to destroy America” or some other spin, especially if antifa initiates force. When nazis show up to events they dress and prepare for violence but usually try to incite opponents into throwing the first punches. Coupled with increasing police presence at these types of events (that could be amplified with further speech laws), I don’t find it unreasonable to conclude that antifa faces a severe disadvantage and might only be putting people from generally marginalized backgrounds in the path of danger from fascists or the blue backing them.

A unique anarchist response would be one that relies on avoiding or countering police violence, that learns how to face evil without giving into ungrounded reactionaryism, and reaffirms a commitment to open dialogue. While I can’t stress the importance of anti-fascism enough, the modern institutionalization we witness of the movement does not seem readily compatible with anarchist principles, and I urge caution when entering these spaces. More and more I find myself wanting to film police than to participate in the actual protests. I want to talk to the people on the ground about their experiences protesting and I look for ways to be proactive in preventing high-stress situations from arising. It would be irresponsible for me to join this Left-led bandwagon and assume that liberal ideals should be tossed out in the name of freedom, or to not move to center state violence as well in our conversations about activism. Letting our rich diversity of thought guide us, my hope is that we can move towards a more peaceful and equitable solution.

CW: descriptions of war, violence, and torture

One of the key debates around antifascist action centers on the question of defense and aggression. For many in the liberal and libertarian milieus, the heuristic for acceptable versus unacceptable violence is the non-aggression principle (NAP), which states that the only justified violence is that which seeks to prevent other violence and/or the infringement of one’s rights to person and property.

This formulation leaves a lot to be desired (and defined). Here are just a few of the ways this approach leaves things open to interpretation:

• Aggression is hard to define. Especially in a world where violence is cyclical and ever-present.
• Not all rights violations are equal in kind and effect.
• We are not atomistically individual. I have a legitimate interest in the defense of my friends and family just as I do in my own defense.
• Defense can be proportional or not and this matters.  

Before we dive into each of these points, I want to share a meditation on violence that I’ve prayed with often in the past six months — bear with me:

10 years ago, I read a Time magazine article about the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Maybe it was Newsweek, it doesn’t matter. It could have been any piece about any war.

It had many terrifying points, but what stuck with me was the description of how some soldiers would terrorize families by killing the children in front of their parents. In particular, there was a practice of throwing infants into pots of boiling water. They would scream. They would burn. They would die. And the soldiers would leave the parents alive, to clean up the burning flesh.

I often revisit that image. The screaming mother. The sobbing father.

It wasn’t about seizing resources necessary to some fight. It wasn’t even about the brutal truth of killing an enemy combatant because you had to — or thought you did. It was about cruelty. It was about gleeful violence and the pathology of hate.

It was inhuman. And yet, it was something that people, real human beings, could be brought to do with less effort than you’d think. I started to see it everywhere. The co-mingled fear and hate that drives people to desperate, horrific violence.

Only fear can make you boil a child.

I learned more about this war later — how these soldiers had been brought on as children themselves, tortured and enslaved, and brought to fear their commanders so desperately, they would do anything asked. Violence is a water wheel, and fear is the river.

I was attracted to the US libertarian movement because of it’s emphasis on peace, on opposing war, and on opposing force. As I dug deeper into the ideas, I discovered an even deeper tradition of liberalism and tolerance. This was a tradition of peace not only in the relationships between nations, but also in the relationships between people.

I became a friend.

I began to meditate.

I tried to seek peace with all people. In all the ways that I could.

But violence is persistent, just like the fear it stems from. Four years ago, I threatened a man with a knife. It was self defense — he made it clear he wanted to beat me and rape the woman I was with. Another time I threw a set of keys at a lover because losing her love and support terrified me so much. I talked joyfully about the things I wanted to do to agents of oppression. About the guns I wanted to own and the cops I wanted to hurt. About the Nazis I would punch.

As the political violence in America escalated, my friends started to defend things I found absolutely disgusting. They were talking about beating uninformed young people. No, these kids weren’t capable of reform, they had to be destroyed, just like their older compatriots. I couldn’t see how anyone could feel this way.

Then I had a stun grenade thrown at me by riot cops. It was tense situation, but I was standing with the clergy — unarmed and peaceful. And I started to understand. It’s frustrating to remain nonviolent in the face of such naked force. And I was afraid again — more of the things this experience made we want to do than of anything that could happen to me.

I saw that fear again in the eyes of one policewoman as we stood toe to toe and she almost broke rank. We were chanting to her that if she just came over, we could all go home and enjoy a nice afternoon. But she was afraid — of the black masked mass before her and of the federal agent standing beside her. He was literally holding her back — one arm on his riot shield, one gripping her arm.

I wish she’d done it. She was so very close.

But she was also very afraid.

Aggression is hard to define

One thing we know about violence is that it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Violence is both cyclical and contagious. People who act violently, often do so because they are afraid and because they have experienced violence themselves. This doesn’t excuse it, but it’s important to understand — especially when thinking about fascism.

Like the policewoman who was too afraid to break rank, fascists are kept in line and driven to violence primarily by each other. It’s the same internal group dynamic that drives military conditioning (remember those Congolese soldiers?), locker room bullying, and gang initiation rites.

There are two forces at work here: in-groups commit violence against each other to get members to commit violence against outsiders; when in-groups commit violence against outsiders it builds the in-group connections. The notorious internal violence of Hitler’s SA and SS is illustrative here.

Anarchists do this too. I lost friends and was threatened by acquaintances for suggesting the first Battle of Berkeley wasn’t strategic or well-planned. I feel much closer to the people I’ve faced police lines with than nearly anyone else.

The psychology of group violence matters on both sides of the line. It means that meeting Nazis with violence probably strengthens their in-group bonds. It also means that simply talking to people motivated by desperate fear and intense in-group pressure is a tall order indeed. It means that anarchists acting together in defense builds movements and trust in a way that’s hard to achieve otherwise. Part of the reasoning for doing this now is that when it does become more necessary, we don’t want a loosely knit group of people who don’t trust one another. We want people who have fought together before.

What I’m saying here is that there’s more at play in violent confrontations than the immediate goals and effects. If we’re going to debate the the usefulness of violent confrontations, we have to look at the factors that surround what might look like aggression in the abstract.  

Not all rights violations are equal in kind and effect

Violence is baked into the world in which we live, but that doesn’t mean all violence is equal. The non-aggression principle oversimplifies aggression, but there are some important factors to look for. There are two factors in particular: effectiveness and intent.

We all know what a difference in effectiveness means. Here’s a violent example where two people of very different physical ability trade blows (cw: interpersonal violence). This video was shared around by Men’s Rights Activists for a while. “Explain why this isn’t justified?” they asked. The NAP says it is. But any sane person can see why the effectiveness of one’s violence is relevant in a case like this.

Liberals like to lump all rights violations together, but a slap in the face is not a bullet to the brain. More importantly, violations of person and property are not morally equivalent. Restitution is (relatively) easy when the violence is against property. A Starbucks window can be replaced. A human life can’t be.

The vast majority of anti-fascist violence is against property. The violence against people is almost always both non-lethal and directed against agents of the state. There are outliers, and we should speak out against these excesses and celebrations of violence (here’s looking at you Berkeley). However, the overstepping of some anti-fascist groups should not condemn the whole movement.

This is where I see a lot of people miss the mark, treating this violence as equivalent to say, Heather Heyer’s death or the fascist shootings that have happened in recent years.

“Why are they carrying sticks and shields and smoke bombs if they don’t want to hurt anyone?” ask the apologists for Nazi violence in Charlottesville. It’s because the cops want to kill and injure them. I know this because I’ve seen cops continue to pepper spray already-detained people. I know this because cops pose a significant danger to the same groups targeted by fascists: people of color, immigrants, and queer people. I know this because one of my comrades had both her ankles broken during an arrest — despite the fact that she was very much cooperating.

At the center of the non-aggression principle is the analysis of intent. Violence meant to get what one wants, or for simple cruelty, is wrong. Violence intended to protect is fine. This general thrust is the one thing the NAP gets right.

Nazi’s tell us their intent: they want genocide. And when they get the chance, they act on this intent.

Now let’s look at the intention of anti-fascist violence. There are two goals: to protect people and to show force and strength in an attempt to discourage the Nazis.

To see this, just pick up any piece of black bloc literature. The point of the bloc is to do damage to property in order to show force and make a point and to protect other protesters, including de-arresting those who are detained. As the Crimethinc communique linked above puts it: “A Bloc presence may convey important information: to the powers that be, don’t fuck with this march, or don’t you dare rig that jury; to allies or possible allies, don’t despair, we’re with you.”

If you’ve ever been in a bloc, this is abundantly clear. You stick together and don’t leave your comrades unless it’s absolutely necessary. People more at risk — black folks, smaller people, disabled activists — stand toward the center. If there are non-bloc protestors, you put yourself between them and the cops.

Another clear indicator here are the weapons of choice. Nazis carry pipes and guns. Antifascists carry sticks, shields, smoke bombs, and, yes, sometimes fireworks.

These are meant to warn off attackers and to show them that their aggression won’t be as effective as they think. It’s the same principle as that at work with schoolyard bullies and with muggers. Fascists are afraid, and that means they’re only in for it if the targets are easy.

Here’s a personal anecdote to illustrate what I mean:

When I was in high school, I got bullied and beaten up for being trans. At one homecoming dance, a guy approached me and started saying some things about how I “wasn’t a real man” and didn’t deserve to be dancing with the girl I’d come with. He ended up pushing me.

Now, I have no reason to believe he was going to do anything more than that. In fact I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. But people were watching, and other guys had done much worse to me before. So I decked him. I had to show I was capable of defense and retaliation. Not because this particular dude was an imminent threat — he wasn’t— but because taking the hit without retaliating would have opened me up to even more abuse in the future.

We are not atomistically individual

One conversation I’ve had a lot recently is what constitutes a true threat.

The difficulty here is that  it’s hard to see the danger when you’re not in their targeted groups. Lots of market anarchists are white men. There’s a lot to be discussed on that point alone, but I think the movement’s discomfort around anti-fascist action has a lot to do with this demographic landscape. Conversely, the anti-fascist activists I’ve worked with are overwhelming female and  queer, and usually face other forms of oppression as well: on the basis of immigration status, race, and disability.

It’s a lot easier to take fascists’ threats seriously when they’re directed against people like you. This is precisely why it’s important for cis and white people and men to get involved in community defense. As always, those most at risk are taking on the biggest burdens. There’s a Martin Niemoller quote that I think describes precisely what we’re seeing right now:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The fears of those being targeted are far from overstated.

Why are people of color, immigrants, and queer people so afraid of fascists? Well, one reason is that the fascists — unlike the radical left — work hand in hand with the most violent people in society: cops. And when I say “hand in hand,” I’m not being flippant: white supremacists are common in law enforcement.

This makes fascist violence deadly effective, and it has implications for how we respond to fascists’ calls for violence. When fascists say they want genocide, are we to interpret this as an empty political desire? If they’re not pointing a gun directly at you, how can you justify acting defensively?

They don’t have to pull the trigger, they just show up and let the cops do their dirty work for them. Want to violently break up immigrant families? No need to hurt them yourself, just call ICE. Want trans people to get killed? Out them to the general population and general bigots will do the rest (CW: this link contains extremely graphic descriptions of anti-trans violence). Or even better — put them in a situation where there’s a confrontation with cops.

Furthermore, fascist violence isn’t always identifiable as such. They don’t always show up with swastikas and tiki torches. Our difficulty in telling when and where we’re under threat stems in part from the fascist’s ability to blend his violence with that of the state, that of general societal bigotry, that of the patriarchy, and that of the police.

It’s understandable that, living in a world where you know these people want to kill you — in part because they’ve said as much — and having no idea where they are or when they’ll strike, one might strike back at them the few times they make themselves identifiable and stand up for those threats.

I agree that violence should only be our last resort. But it’s hard to know when other approaches have failed when the threat is ubiquitous and constant.

And there is some illuminating history on trying to stop fascists with persuasion alone. The mainstream left tried that in 1930s Germany, and there’s some evidence that their fear of doubling down on the Nazi’s chosen language of choice —violence— is what sealed the fate of Germany and Europe. The urge to resist violence until absolutely necessary is a noble one. But you don’t want to wait until the harm is already done.

Defense can be proportional or not and this matters

There’s no easy way to know if this kind of defensive action is necessary or effective.

Did I really have to hit that guy to prevent others from hurting me? What if I hadn’t pulled a knife on the subway attacker? I’ll never know. Would the fascists in Charlottesville have “crushed” the peaceful demonstrators if anarchists hadn’t shown up to stop them?

Dr. Cornel West certainly thinks so. But that’s the difficulty of effective defense: if it works, you can never prove it was necessary.

And that makes violent confrontation a slippery beast indeed. It’s hard to tell if those acting with force are doing so because they’re legitimately worried about true threats to the wellbeing of themselves or those in the community, or if they’re just getting off on violence the same as the Nazi thugs. As one It’s Going Down editor put it to Vice, some of them think “this shit is fun.”

We should be careful to make sure that any violence done is strategic and necessary.

It’s simple to just give into the fear and start beating Nazis. It’s simple and it does feel good. But even if we think violent resistance is sometimes necessary and strategic, we, as anarchists, absolutely cannot revel in it.

The central thrust of the NAP is intent, and there are so many ways to get this wrong. The best way to know you’re on the right side and not acting out of misplaced fear, a desire to dominate, or as a result of ingroup pressure is to approach the question from a place of taste. You have to keep abhorring the violence even if you do think it’s necessary.

And that’s what I try to do. I try to maintain a shame around the fact that I’m not always brave enough to resist my fears. I try to hate the part of myself that loves my own life and that of my friends so much that I would risk someone else’s. If we give into the jubilation and simplicity that comes with viewing our own violence as righteous, we’re no better than the fascists and their worship of death. No violence is righteous, even if it’s sometimes necessary.

When discussing political nonviolence and its various means, one is likely to encounter much sneering and indignation. Advocates of political violence not only appear not to understand our disagreement, they often appear to find it reprehensible and cowardly. The charge of ‘cowardice’ especially fascinates me, and I would like to examine it more closely. For all intents and purposes, political violence and nonviolence involve very similar risks and strength of conviction. Both demand putting human bodies on the line with unclear odds of success. Both demand some rather dire weighing of moral and material interests. Still there’s something to the charge—I believe that what advocates of violence perceive as ‘cowardice’ is the implicit, structural, humility of nonviolence. Political violence requires dogmatic belief that one is right, one’s opponents have almost nothing to offer, and that violence will be effective. It is true that we shy away from the absolute certainty and confidence of those who advocate violence. Advocates of political nonviolence do not attempt to utterly erase their opponents from the world; they allow them to exist. This is the distinguishing characteristic that comes across as ‘cowardly,’ but it is the chief advantage of political nonviolence.

Before we consider the charge of cowardice, we need to survey the terrain. In terms of political goals, violent and nonviolent actions have mostly the same conditions for success or failure. On the margin, extreme violence can eliminate certain perspectives from public view (through confinement or murder)—nonviolent actions cannot. However, violent and nonviolent actions both require accepting serious risks to personal well-being. Whether the response to one’s actions is violent or nonviolent, one could be seriously harmed. Even if one’s opponents forego violence against bodies, they can still inflict devastating psychic and social harm. Surely no one doubts the incredible psychic pain inflicted by anti-abortion protesters on women entering clinics, regardless of their broader political effectiveness. Even so, marginal cases should be kept analytically distinct from larger political goals. Ideas, once present in the public realm, are resistant to simple erasure. The consequences of public actions for the prevailing political culture are hard to predict. Sometimes extreme violence can make the public expression of certain ideas anathema and thus hinder their political success, and other times it can lead to such intense backlash that it can actually alienate the perpetrators and assist the spread of those ideas. What matters is how the people who remain react. Because the relevant audiences of political action are public bodies, success or failure comes down to prevailing interpretations—both for violent and nonviolent actions.

There are plenty of worthy illustrations of this principle at work. The United States employed extreme violence with an incredible military advantage in Vietnam. American military forces massacred the population in unconscionable numbers and demolished the economy of the country. Nonetheless, the meaning of the violence was so intolerable to the Vietnamese people that they continued to throw bodies into the resistance until they repelled the invasion. On the other hand, military advantages often succeed in making resistance seem so costly that the invaded population effectively surrenders. Gandhi’s satyagrahis made British colonial rule so difficult and morally offensive that it could not be continued. Nonviolent resistance failed to prevent nuclear proliferation in the United States. It’s debatable how much success nonviolent resistance had in the American Civil Rights movement. The point here is not to say once and for all what was ultimately politically efficacious in these historical situations, but to propose that the outcomes were not easily predictable and that violent and nonviolent actions alike succeed or fail depending on their public meaning.

Many advocates of violent action acknowledge this, and propose that violent and nonviolent strategies be employed simultaneously. They observe that nonviolent strategies like those of Gandhi or King were employed side by side with violent strategies that made them more appealing to those in power. There are few things worth considering in light of that observation. It doesn’t establish any particular advantage for violent or nonviolent action. It also seems likely that there are relevant differences between strategies aimed at changing established political institutions and those aimed at effecting broader cultural change (the two are, of course, not totally independent). Lastly, it seems to assume that violent and nonviolent actions generally interact harmoniously rather than antagonistically. That assumption is clearly unwarranted. Maybe coordinated violence can make the demands of nonviolent forces more palatable and motivate engagement with them—but maybe it instead detracts from the perceived legitimacy of the nonviolent forces. Maybe violent actions scare people out of breaking with established peace, or maybe they push people toward cataclysmic civil war. The point is that this analysis generally attempts to circumvent considerations of the political conditions for any strategy’s success, and is to that extent wrongheaded.

Precisely because violent and nonviolent strategies are so often antagonistic and incompatible, we should be wary of an unprincipled ‘diversity of tactics’—especially if that means throwing our hands up and totally forswearing all strategy. But that appears to leave us without any solid or systematic means by which to decide between one or the other approach. I would like to propose that it is the perceived ‘cowardice’ of nonviolence that gives it at least one, albeit defeasible, advantage. Though nonviolent tactics can still be massively harmful, they do at least refrain from erasing anyone from the playing field. Nonviolent strategies are more immediately discursive, since the point is to engage others’ minds and activate their consciences rather than circumvent or destroy their minds. Since the point of political action is always on some level capturing public support, this enables more acute focus on framing the debate and using effective rhetoric. Nonviolent strategies engage the political conditions of their success more directly; instead of dedicating one’s resources and energies toward the destruction of the enemy, one can simply dedicate them to whatever it was that one wanted in the first place (to occupy land, live a certain way, engage in certain kinds of relationships, or highlight the violence and irrationality of one’s opponent). Unless one’s goal is violence itself, violent strategy involves a detour from one’s ultimate goal.

To reiterate, while nonviolent strategy does not have an advantage in terms of political efficacy per se, it is advantageous in providing focus on public discourse directly and in displaying humility (and thus openness) about its demands. The humility of nonviolent strategies is what makes them appear ‘cowardly’ to advocates of violence, but it is also what allows for more widespread support. And since violence and nonviolence are often strategically incompatible, it is not sufficient to argue for simultaneously employing both. The disadvantage of nonviolence is that it is not nearly as effective at preserving bodies on the margin—because it is targeted at the political realm more directly, it is also weakest when it is most isolated from the public eye and political discourse. Finally, there are situations where neither violent nor nonviolent strategies will succeed, and it is likely these situations in which marginal cases are most relevant for determining actions—and I believe it is in these situations where violence is at its most advantageous.

In marginal, publicly invisible situations, where one’s aim is the immediate protection of bodies against impending violence rather than the achievement of some large-scale political goal, violence is almost certainly the more strategic choice. Particularly in cases of crime where the public (and, for that matter, the legal system) already recognizes an act of violence as illegitimate, the perpetrator already lacks public approval and is choosing to act in spite of that (and probably under the hope that they will circumvent public involvement). Thus, appealing to social capital and public conscience would be strategically inept. This actually illustrates the strategic position of violence—it works very well when one cannot appeal to the public, and when one isn’t trying to. Political goals, especially concerning the direction of popular culture, requires appealing to the public because it is primarily about what the public does. Because violence works best when it is supported by the public or else unseen by it, it is a poor tool for acquiring the support of a broad public. The indirectly political nature of violence makes it useful for preventing the complete destruction of human bodies, with diminishing returns as politics and social power take center stage. When political success is more or less off the table, the protection of human lives on the margin is the relatively more important consideration. Situations involving institutions with established public support (or acceptance) or ascendant status make any successful resistance unlikely. In the face of mass deportation or imprisonment with broad-based popular authorization, or the revolutionary establishment of an authoritarian regime, marginal protection might be the only feasible goal. Violence has a unique advantage when politics are avoidable, as in marginal cases obscured from public view; nonviolence has a unique advantage when politics are unavoidable, as in campaigns for cultural and institutional change.

Di Lucy Steigerwald. Originale pubblicato il 14 novembre 2017 con il titolo Who Are We Burning Flags For? Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Il 24 ottobre scorso un giudice ha archiviato l’accusa rivolta contro diversi manifestanti che l’anno scorso hanno bruciato la bandiera americana al congresso nazionale repubblicano. Tecnicamente, i manifestanti non sono stati accusati di aver bruciato la bandiera perché quest’accusa potrebbe costituire una violazione della libertà di parola. Sono stati accusati con una delle tante armi a disposizione dello stato: disturbo della quiete pubblica e ostruzione. Ma il giudice ha visto nell’accusa un po’ di violazione della libertà di parola e l’ha annullata. Meglio tardi che mai.

Intanto una parrocchia della Lousiana, andando contro la sentenza Texas v. Johnson (1989), ha stabilito che bruciare la bandiera va contro la legge. La sezione locale dell’Associazione Americana per le Libertà Civili (ACLU) dissente, e non è la prima volta. Altro inquietante caso recente è quello di Joshua Brubaker, in Pennsylvania, arrestato nel 2014 per aver scritto “AIM” (Movimento Indiano d’America) su una bandiera americana, esposta all’ingresso di casa dopo aver appreso che il sito del massacro di Wounded Knee era in vendita. Già fa spavento che si arrestino manifestanti perché a detta di qualcuno potrebbero fare danni, ma essere arrestati per aver esposto quella che a tutti gli effetti è una bandiera nella propria proprietà è un salto di livello. Dopo il ricorso della ACLU a suo favore, Brubaker ha ottenuto un risarcimento di 55.000 dollari.

Autorità locali e statali continuano ad ignorare la sentenza Texas v. Johnson e approvano leggi per punire chi brucia e profana la bandiera. Negli ultimi anni, politici federali in cerca di visibilità (compresa l’ex senatrice Hillary Clinton) hanno appoggiato leggi o addirittura emendamenti costituzionali per criminalizzare quella che è chiaramente un’opinione.

Il fatto che bruciare e profanare la bandiera sia legale non significa però che la polizia e i politici locali lo considerino come tale, o che la gente non si senta offesa. La protesta in ginocchio del giocatore Colin Kaepernick contro il razzismo americano e la brutalità della polizia era inoffensiva, educata, riservata. A suo vantaggio è il fatto di essere un giocatore di football senza contratto e di essersi lasciato strappare la protesta in una febbrile quanto maldestra azione contro Trump. Troppo onore per quest’ultimo. E però, se Kaepernick è stato inondato di critiche per un atto così innocente, che possibilità abbiamo noi di abbattere il potere di questo simbolo dello statalismo? Noi che sogniamo cambiamenti più grandi di quelli di Kaepernick, da dove cominciamo?

La bandiera ha potere. La definirei una transustanziazione, se la metafora non fosse offensiva. Ogni veterano ha combattuto per la bandiera. Tutte le bandiere americane sono simili, e tutte sono intrise di americanismo. Non di atrocità, come il militarismo o la violenza poliziesca (problemi abbastanza grandi da portare una persona a rifiutarsi di mettere la mano sul cuore o togliere il cappello), ma solo della versione filmica di quella che avrebbe potuto essere, e non sarà mai, una fiaba.

L’adorazione della bandiera ha conseguenze reali. Così scrisse il sito satirico Onion: “La Bandiera Americana Ritirata dalla Circolazione dopo Aver Causato 143 Milioni di Morti”. Nazionalismo significa invariabilmente dimenticare gli abitanti di una nazione, tranne quando si tratta di valutare la loro vita mille volte quella di chi vive altrove. Il nazionalismo si trasmette tramite rituali come la fedeltà alla bandiera o l’attenti in atteggiamento rispettoso durante l’inno. Ne consegue che se sei contro il messaggio insito in questi rituali devi essere iconoclasta. Devi distruggere questi simboli divinizzati che rafforzano l’idea collettiva di stato e la sua superiorità rispetto ai diritti e alle libertà dell’individuo.

Purtroppo, l’atto di bruciare la bandiera raramente genera quel discorso sottile e profondo che può cambiare le menti. A volte vorresti che fosse così; senti Phil Ochs e pensi al complesso industriale-militare e improvvisamente ti viene voglia di dissacrare una bandiera (per esempio). Vuoi sfasciare qualcosa di sacro per lo stato perché pensi alle guerre e pensi che non la smetteranno mai. Ma per quanto l’atto di bruciare la bandiera per un anarchico significhi stima e empatia verso gli altri, per qualcuno, per tantissimi, quest’atto appare carico d’odio reazionario, è socialista o comunista (nel senso sovietico più diretto e spregiativo).

Ironicamente, l’atto può non convincere. Se credete che bruciare la bandiera significhi sputare sulla più bella località geografica al mondo, disprezzando gli americani che hanno sofferto in inferni di guerra negli ultimi due secoli, vedere la bandiera che brucia non cambia la vostra opinione. Ma è il numero delle persone che vorrebbero vietare quest’atto a renderlo importante in sé. Secondo un sondaggio del Cato Institute, il settanta per cento dei repubblicani vuole una legge contro l’oltraggio alla bandiera. Oltre il cinquanta per cento è d’accordo con l’idea spasmodica, espressa in un tweet dal presidente Trump, che chi brucia la bandiera deve essere privato della cittadinanza.

Chi pensa che l’oltraggio alla bandiera significhi più della distruzione di un oggetto dovrebbe capire che si tratta di un’opinione, dovrebbe accettare il fatto che quando si esprimono le proprie opinioni in questo modo non succede niente di orribile.

Moralmente, e forse anche filosoficamente, bruciare la bandiera è come salire su una cassetta di sapone e parlare in pubblico, con la differenza che non illumina quelle complessità che le persone con gli occhi e le orecchie tappate sono in grado di capire. Chi ha visto gli attivisti che bruciavano le bandiere al congresso repubblicano, o i poliziotti impiccioni oltraggiati dalla bandiera del Movimento Indiano Americano di Joshua Brubaker, non può capire, o si rifiuta di capire, il messaggio. Ci vede un attacco contro tutte le persone a lui care, non un grido d’accusa contro un sistema che schiaccia vite umane.

Non si può cambiare il nazionalismo con un grande atto purificatore, anche se a volte sembra che basti far saltare in aria le statue dei presidenti, bruciare tutte le bandiere tranne quelle nere, arcobaleno, viola o rosa, per liberare tutti quanti. Avverrà, ma molto più lentamente, molto più gradualmente, e serviranno molte più parole. Bisogna sgobbare. Bisogna parlare con persone che, nel migliore dei casi, pensano che noi abbiamo disperatamente torto e siamo terribilmente naif. Bisogna lasciarli strillare e poi spiegare che le cose possono essere altrimenti. Non dobbiamo rispettare il significato della bandiera, non ne abbiamo bisogno. Dobbiamo distruggere quel significato, ma per quanto ci tenti l’idea di distruggerlo col fuoco o la vernice, è improbabile che il meglio dell’anarchismo e dell’antistatalismo nasca così.

These days I run a small business and no longer literally wear my politics on my sleeve, but in the late nineties I was a member of a chapter of Anti Racist Action in the Midwest. The politics of ARA members were eclectic, to say the least—a mixture of anarchists, libertarians, liberals, communists, and plenty of unique cranks. But what united us was a certain seriousness about protecting our community from neonazi gangs and stopping their recruitment. If neonazi boneheads tried to force their way into spaces, we’d run them off. If they tried to book shows, we’d get them cancelled. ARA emerged as a means of community self-defense in an era when neonazis would routinely beat bloody random strangers on the street. That such neonazi thuggery has been less prominent for years is the direct result of decades of serious work by antifascists to expose and resist them.

Today the media talking heads who have just discovered the term “antifa” read into it their own culture war narratives as a bunch of newly militant SJWs now out to brutally censor anyone with whom they disagree. Instead of “antifa” meaning one of the few members of an antifascist organization, it’s become a shorthand for the radical left, or hipsters, or whatever your personal boogeyman is. As one would expect, this weird media narrative has been something of a godsend to very the same neonazi meatheads who used to bust skulls.

It’s amazing how fast people forget, or perhaps want to forget, but the eighties and nineties were a bloody and brutal period in many American cities. The traditional story is that neonazis tried to infiltrate punk and then we ran them off, but to be honest a number of those in the scene were always drawn by violence and pseudo-transgressive reactionary politics. Neonazis offered them an excuse and a community. By the time we’d gotten our asses together and realized this wasn’t just a few random bad apples we could argue with, they’d effectively taken over the scene. Words like “punk” and “skinhead” became synonymous with “nazi” in a lot of people’s minds. You’d go to a show and find a half dozen neonazis intimidating people and demanding to know if they were jewish and you’d think, maybe this punk stuff isn’t for me. Never mind our ideals or who we actually were, that’s what people saw. By right-hook or by crook they’d find ways to dominate our spaces.

Today conservatives face a similar situation. The same old neonazi thugs with “white pride” tattoos have come to dominate conservative representation at rallies, even when they remain a minority. The rise of the fascistic alt-right online may seem different, they trade bad memes rather than bad records, but in many ways they’re the same scrawny poseurs I used to know all too well, just emerging from a different subculture.

Every young person has a need to belong and to feel powerful; this is how extremist groups like ISIS recruit. Take a total loser and feed them garbage, make them feel like everyone truly is out to get them, tell them that they belong with you and your buds, and they’ll do anything for you. Almost everyone in ARA had former friends who’d gotten sucked up in nazi shit. Few of us took it seriously at first, you just write your former friend off as a dumb-ass. You might try arguing with them a bit before you realize how futile reason is. But then inevitably something happens that makes it all the more real. For me it was a friend of mine getting hospitalized by a couple of boot boys. His crime? Waiting for the bus while black.

I wish people would understand that modern antifascist practice arose as self-defense. It was also fundamentally anarchist; we never thought of going to the cops, and we never supported state suppression of neonazis. On the one hand, we didn’t trust the cops and on the other hand there was a sense of personal responsibility; we’d let this happen, and it was our job to clean it up. People needed to know that not every punk was a neonazi. This is why I don’t have much sympathy for the MAGA folks these days. You can sit around whining about how not every Trump supporter is a white nationalist, how the neonazis out there don’t represent you, and how the media is unfair or you can get off your ass and do something about them.

In Samuel Edward Konkin’s theory of agorism, the state is replaced not by some political revolution but slowly, through people choosing to contract with one another outside the state’s control. People who seek to buy and sell peacefully on black or grey markets evolve ways to settle disputes, and they also develop means of collective self-defense. These organizations hold each other accountable and are held accountable by their members, stopping anyone from seizing power. Eventually the state itself is brought to justice, as if it was just another violent gang.

Antifa, in my experience, functioned exactly like an agorist defense organization. In the face of an ultra-violent network of gangs that sought power, we came together to do three things:

1) Protect our spaces

2) Accurately expose their members

3) Disrupt their organizing

4) Defend one another with force

The first was pretty simple. Nazis love to intrude places where they’re not welcome to try to get new recruits, in part because they often can’t draw people on their own. They’re parasites, plain and simple. Just as nazis used to shove their way into punk shows, Richard Spencer intruded on the 2017 International Students For Liberty Conference uninvited with a small gaggle of wannabe thugs who tried to pick fights and ended up getting floored by an army veteran. A big part of what we used to do in response is function as glorified bouncers.

The second is more complicated. Modern antifascist groups are often more investigative journalists than anything else. The game these days is mostly about mapping their social networks, infiltrating their circles, documenting everything you can, and reading everything they write. It’s exhausting work, but some people are really good at it. Undercover work can get extreme and is often intensely stressful and dangerous, but it gets good results. Antifa groups build internal databases on fascist and fascist-adjacent movements. And when the time is right they release detailed and well-sourced reports to the public. While recent internet “activists” like Anonymous like to dump massive doxes, actual antifa groups have historically focused on 100% accuracy. This means antifascists are very careful about cross-checking their claims and not using loose language. Far from labeling every republican a “nazi,” antifa groups tend to be sticklers for ideological distinctions. While it’s fine for some civilian like me to casually dismiss a white nationalist or christian identity believer as a “nazi,” antifa themselves are actually far more precise. In fact, while liberal journalists and NGOs love to smear antifascists, they often rely on our reporting in writing stories. It’s an ethical or personal calling for most antifascists, especially after seeing how police forces often refuse to investigate or prosecute organized white supremacists that attack and invade our communities. Just as the state was never going to bring anyone at Goldman Sachs to justice, the state was never going to stop white nationalists; we have to do this for ourselves. Once antifa orgs have exposed their organizing efforts to the light, civil people can freely organize boycotts or engage in resistance.

The third thing antifascists do is the most controversial. Antifascists disrupt fascist organizing. It’s one thing to have an old friend start spouting racist conspiracy stories, it’s quite another when they build an organization explicitly dedicated to ethnic cleansing. When a murderous gang like the Hammerskins puts on a music festival, what they’re really doing isn’t merely peacefully listening to some music with objectionable views: they’re using the event to organize and recruit for their race war. In that sort of situation, a local antifa group might rally community support, inform the owner of the venue, picket the event, document attendees, pull fire alarms, throw smoke bombs, drown it out with sirens and chants — anything to get their recruitment shut down. In an agorist lens this is precisely what is supposed to happen to stop criminal gangs from growing into something like the state. You collaborate to stop any organization that wants to build too much power and certainly any organization that is openly working toward something as innately criminal as ethnic cleansing. Indeed, it’s almost requisite for community defense organizations to team up to suppress any such gang.

The fourth thing antifascists do is straightforward: we fight back. However this often looks a little more complicated than a lot of non-aggression principle people often imagine. When nazis have been attacking your neighbors for sport, ganging up on minorities or non-nazi punks whenever they have the numbers, it would be a mistake to sit around waiting for them to start a fight where you have the numbers. I mean sometimes they’ll be that dumb, but it’s not a good plan in general. When your friends and neighbors are getting jumped walking home from work or from a show and you know who’s doing it, you are effectively at war. It becomes valid to jump known neonazi gang members on sight. You can’t isolate and only respond to individual acts of violence the moment they happen. And let’s be clear: the far-right is overwhelmingly violent. White supremacist and white nationalist gangs are dismissed as not particularly concerning or politically relevant these day but that’s thanks to the work of antifascist groups that pushed them out of certain city cores. Sometimes this involved building community coalitions above ground, but other times this involved identifying and beating their members until they were afraid to go out hunting for victims.

Yet white supremacist gangs remain in control of much of our country’s red market. (That is to say, as Konkin put it, the portion of the economy prohibited by the state that’s criminal not just in the sense of the state’s law, but criminal in the sense of natural law.) These gangs are still incredibly powerful, The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas has more than two thousand members. Many of these gangs are deeply tied to “purely political” white nationalist organizations and their membership crosses over constantly. Many of the streetfighting rank and file of the alt-right, who now pretend to be all about free speech, are felons with nasty histories of violence and white supremacist tattoos.

Despite attempts to equivocate between left and right, the far-right is overwhelmingly responsible for the lion’s share of violence. Even just this partial list of recent terrorist acts by white nationalists is chilling, and that doesn’t include the countless jumpings and other acts of street brutality, or even killings, that are considered merely “criminal” rather than terroristic.

Of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far-right wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).1

And, of course, radical islamists are just another variant of fascism, which is why antifa activists have put their lives on the line to fight ISIS in Syria.

Antifa is almost precisely the sort of project libertarians have long called for: a network of non-partisan organizations formed from the grassroots and operating in the grey or black market to combat organized crime. Unlike paramiltary organizations like the Oath Keepers that work with and reinforce the police state while collaborating with white nationalists and other racists, antifa groups realize that the state is an engine of murder and destruction that cannot be trusted, not even against even worse would-be tyrants. Antifascists have tended to have better and more accurate reporting than liberal NGOs, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which collaborate with the state and call for hate crimes laws that are just expansions of government censorship.

Do I agree with everything done in the name of “antifa” since the rise of Trump? No, of course not. Just as conservative commentators have only now discovered antifa, many leftists have likewise only just discovered it or decided that they’re interested. As a libertarian I’m not okay with the unethical black bloc habit of breaking random storefront windows, and I’m certainly no fan of the communist regimes some new members are soft on. I have my critiques, but I recognize that white nationalist organizations are a far greater danger. No amount of juvenile vandalism or annoying SJW behavior online will ever match the threat of actual terrorists and thugs calling for ethnic cleansing. It frightens me that in our polarized political conflict people are focusing so much on blue state versus red state narratives that they’ve forgotten what a danger neonazis still pose.

The alt-right has encouraged this at all points, trying to teach a younger generation (and older conservatives who never noticed anything before) that “nazis don’t exist” or that “the Klan is a psyop”. This only works because they’re able to push a narrative that when antifa talk about nazis they mean Trump voters or someone white wearing dreads or doing something problematic. Then tribal fears take over and Republicans are happy to believe anyone telling them that neonazis are a myth.

The use of Trump voters by white nationalists as a shield has become a complicated situation that requires new tactics. Antifa in Minneapolis have perhaps shown the way: when alt-right advocates of race war tried to infiltrate a pro-Trump rally the organizers worked with local antifa groups to help keep them out.

While my days in the streets are far behind me, it’s hard to watch decades of work by antifascists come undone as conservatives lap up the stories told to them by nazis who can’t even manage to consistently hide their politics. There’s not much I can do these days without risking my family, but I can try to correct the stories being told.

Demagogues on the right want to have their cake and eat it too on this story. They want to paint antifa as a greater violent threat than fascists, but they also want to paint antifa as weak “hipster college activists.” Given the sheer quantity of fascist violence, those two stories can’t both be true.

In reality antifa are brave people of varying ages and politics, who are sometimes wrong and sometimes make mistakes but are usually far more in the right than their detractors. Antifa is a set of community self-defense organizations that have been around for decades and aren’t a response to Trump.

Here are some actual antifascist groups in case you’re interested in actually reading what they have to say:

Anti Racist Action and the newer TORCH network help coordinate on the national scale.

Some of the most famous, well-organized and venerable local organizations are  NYC Antifa, Southside ARA, Champagne Urbana SHARP, Rose City Antifa and the Twin Cities General Defense Committee.

Slackbastard and ThreeWayFight are longstanding antifa blogs.

And Idavox, the newer ItsGoingDown, and AntifascistNews aggregate news in the antifascist struggle.

Much of the contemporary debate in libertarian circles about free speech and anti-fascist activism takes the form of asking whether libertarians should support or oppose the various actors operating under the name “antifa.” I find this framing of the issue inadequate and artificially limiting. First and foremost, it conflates the question of whether libertarians should oppose fascism with the question of how. Fascist entryists encourage this confusion because they want virulent anti-leftism to supplant a positive commitment to liberalism as the guiding light for libertarians. Socialists encourage it too. They’ve developed a set of tactics based on their priors about fascism and political struggle and change; they want people to fight fascism their way because they think it works and because fighting it their way advances their broader agenda.

Libertarians, though, don’t share those priors, at least not most of them. As such, we would expect a liberal anti-fascist praxis to be quite different than a socialist one. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no such distinctly libertarian praxis has been developed. In the wake of the second world war, liberals became primarily concerned with anticommunism, a focus which has only recently started to change. Not much in the way of libertarian anti-fascism can be found there.

Before and during the second world war, there isn’t much for us to build on, either. After a certain point, liberals were doing pretty much the same thing as everyone else to fight fascists–fighting a war against them. If you want to know how to win a war, guerrilla or conventional, you’ll have to ask someone else. There are a few exceptions to the general trend; the White Rose organization did admirable work under difficult circumstances, but subversive publications are only one small part of what really needs to be a much more comprehensive project.

There are also ideological problems with looking to the liberals of the past. The European liberals bought into the ideas of democracy and self-determination in ways that probably hurt their willingness and ability to resist fascism. Modern libertarians, especially liberal anarchists, have a much more skeptical view of democracy. I think Grayson English put it best:

Democracy is not the opposite of fascism. Democracy is the ladder that fascism climbs and then kicks away.

— sans sheriffs ? (@selfpwner) April 21, 2017

There are two important implications here:

1. Defending the electoral process is, at least in some contexts, entirely orthogonal to fighting fascism.
2. Libertarians should be open to political action outside the democratic electoral process, and indeed to political action that rejects that process entirely as illegitimate.

So if we don’t have much to learn from our intellectual ancestors, we might hope to learn something from our enemies. This isn’t as unlikely an avenue as might be supposed. Marxist histories are often very valuable to libertarians because of the way they tend to decenter the state, and often times there are socialist strategies and approaches that work in spite of the economic and ethical ideas of the persons advancing them.

We can cherry-pick certain anti-fascist practices from the socialists. Not everything that socialists do to oppose fascism is a consequence of their own illiberal political lens; some of it is just the sort of thing you “learn by doing.” Unfortunately, I think there isn’t much that’s salvageable, and that most socialist anti-fascism is the fruit of a tainted tree. To see why, let’s consider the libertarian understanding of fascism and contrast it with the Marxist understanding.

What is Fascism?

Fascism is an authoritarian political system that is collectivist, corporatist, and racist. Political theorist Roger Griffin characterizes fascism as involving “palingenetic ultranationalism,” where “palingenesis” means rebirth. Fascists look back to a golden age, often more myth than fact, that can be reclaimed by throwing away liberal decadence. This means stifling “antisocial” or “inefficient” individual behavior. Private enterprise must be brought to heel and made to serve the interests of the state. Individuals must be taught to find value and meaning in life only through membership in the nation and service to the ethnostate.

Fascism is, furthermore, anti-intellectual in a peculiar way that bears discussing at some length.

Ayn Rand’s categorized fascists as “mystics of muscle,” a phrase I always found particularly evocative. From the Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged (1957):

The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself….Man’s mind…must be subordinated to the will of Society….Man’s standard of value…is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life…is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question….His reward…will be given on earth [not the afterlife]—to his great-grandchildren.

Rand famously saw an abandonment of the mind’s capacity for reason for the body’s unthinking brute force as the root of almost every problem, but in the case of fascism, the charge mostly sticks. Fascists generally reject Enlightenment values wholesale, including the ideal of good-faith discourse.

I quite like Sartre’s comment on this point, from Anti-Semite and Jew (1946):

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I offer the Sartre quote here, though, primarily by way of comparison to a similar but lesser-known passage from Ludwig von Mises in Omnipotent Government (1944):

The German nationalists had to face precisely the same problem as the Marxians. They also could neither demonstrate the correctness of their own statements nor disprove the theories of economics and praxeology. Thus they took shelter under the roof of polylogism, prepared for them by the Marxians. Of course, they concocted their own brand of polylogism. The logical structure of mind, they say, is different with different nations and races. Every race or nation has its own logic and therefore its own economics, mathematics, physics, and so on….In the eyes of the Marxians Ricardo, Freud, Bergson, and Einstein are wrong because they are bourgeois; in the eyes of the Nazis they are wrong because they are Jews. One of the foremost goals of the Nazis is to free the Aryan soul from the pollution of the Western philosophies of Descartes, Hume, and John Stuart Mill. They are in search of arteigen German science, that is, of a science adequate to the racial character of the Germans.

…

Polylogism has a peculiar method of dealing with dissenting views. If its supporters fail to unmask the background of an opponent, they simply brand him a traitor. Both Marxians and Nazis know only two categories of adversaries. The aliens—whether members of a non-proletarian class or of a non-Aryan race—are wrong because they are aliens; the opponents of proletarian or Aryan origin are wrong because they are traitors. Thus they lightly dispose of the unpleasant fact that there is dissension among the members of what they call their own class or race.

Is it any wonder, then, that we hear modern fascists calling white liberals “cucks?” On Mises’s account, it is to be expected. The community of reason is cosmopolitan; the fascist, who despises anything cosmopolitan and cherishes unthinking brutality in service of the ethnostate, can only (and must) mock the children of the Enlightenment as effeminate traitors. The fascist cannot convince (though he does not see this as a shortcoming) and so attempts to humiliate. “Winning,” in the sense of establishing superiority, is more important for him than being right.

This has necessarily only been a bird’s-eye view of the liberal conception of fascism, but a sufficiently clear pattern should emerge. Fascism is fundamentally illiberal in most any aspect you might consider.

Fascism is bad. Fascism is illiberal. Fascism is bad because it is illiberal. The whole point of fighting fascism is to rescue liberalism. Accordingly, a libertarian anti-fascist praxis should itself be liberal in character and aim. An anti-fascist praxis that averts fascism but doesn’t protect liberalism is worthless to the liberal.

The Marxist Conception of Fascism

Marxists view political conflicts as being not merely driven but determined by more fundamental economic conflicts, divided on class lines. The Marxist conception of fascism is no different. As best as I can tell, Leon Trotsky is representative of the broader Marxist approach to the topic, and he is, we shall see, consistent in his analysis across multiple sources.

In “Whither France?” (1934) Trotsky explains that fascism is the flailing reaction of the capitalist class to a self-inflicted crisis. Democracy is discarded because it is no longer getting the job done. The workers must be repressed with direct violence for the capitalists to maintain power, and the fascist militias are means to this end:

Of course, in France, as in certain other European countries (England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries), there still exist parliaments, elections, democratic liberties, or their remnants. But in all these countries, the same historic laws operate, the laws of capitalist decline. If the means of production remain in the hands of a small number of capitalists, there is no way out for society. It is condemned to go from crisis to crisis, from need to misery, from bad to worse. In the various countries, the decrepitude and disintegration of capitalism are expressed in diverse forms and at unequal rhythms. But the basic features of the process are the same everywhere. The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of assuring the people neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order. It is forced to smash the workers and peasants by the use of physical violence. The discontent of the workers and peasants, however, cannot be brought to an end by the police alone. Moreover, if it often impossible to make the army march against the people. It begins by disintegrating and ends with the passage of a large section of the soldiers over to the people’s side. That is why finance capital is obliged to create special armed bands, trained to fight the workers just as certain breeds of dog are trained to hunt game. The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.

He had given the same analysis of German and Italian fascism specifically several years earlier in “What is National Socialism?” (1933):

German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital. Mussolini is right: the middle classes are incapable of independent policies. During periods of great crisis they are called upon to reduce to absurdity the policies of one of the two basic classes. Fascism succeeded in putting them at the service of capital.

For Trotsky, the appearance that fascist movements are populist uprisings is rooted in a trick. Fascists must use socialist rhetoric to gather the requisite support needed to advance the capitalist class’s agenda. He explains it as follows in “What is Fascism?: Extracts from a Letter to a Comrade,” The Militant V.3, Jan 16 1932., original letter Nov. 1931:

The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement….The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement.

Given this historical-materialist analysis of fascism–i.e. that fascism is an expression of class war that emerges when the capitalist class can no longer maintain control using democracy–what follows, tactically speaking?

Socialist Anti-Fascist Praxis

What follows is that fighting fascism means fighting capitalism as such. It means the proletariat winning the class war and establishing communism. It means sweeping away liberalism and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. This point must be emphasized: for the Marxist, resorting to illiberal means and even preferring means that threaten liberalism are not unfortunate necessities of anti-fascist praxis. Rather, they’re part and parcel of the core project (Going back to Trotsky, see “Their Morals and Ours.”).

For socialists, “Punch Nazis” is simply the logic of the gulag, consistently applied. There’s no reason for them not to come out swinging–nothing they value is threatened by doing so. Liberal tolerance is just another obstacle, another attempt by the capitalist class to stave off the revolution. Socialists interpret liberal qualms about just punching fascists until fascism goes away as them being unserious about opposing fascism, tantamount to collaboration. The socialist does not care about the open society, and so does not share the liberal’s reservations about applying ever broader and more extreme violence to the problem.

What Motivates Nazi-Punching?

There is another facet to the centering of violence typical of socialist anti-fascist praxis, though not unique to it by any means, which I think bears mentioning here. To some degree, the centering of violence is rooted in ableist and sexist attitudes about what constitutes “serious” activism. When we talk about whether violence is a justified response, it’s common to contrast violent measures to those “short of” violence, implying a violent response is necessarily more extreme and more serious than a nonviolent one. Now, if violence were always necessarily the most efficacious response to a fascist threat, that would be that. But I think that most often, the whole question of efficacy is skipped, and skipped in part because violence is seen as manly and therefore obviously better than less-manly courses of action. It is the same sort of impulse you see in foreign policy debates, where the most serious politician is the one willing to kill the most people, or in criminal justice debates, where the most serious politician is the one willing to inflict the most pain and suffering on criminals–whether convicted or merely accused. It is the same sort of impulse, even, that contributes to the portrayal of state welfare as “serious” specifically because it involves violent coercion, and mutual aid as “unserious” specifically because it does not.

There is a certain group of people who are, essentially, spoiling for a fight first and opposed to fascism second, and it would do the cause a disservice to let them drive the discourse on resistance to fascism unopposed.

One of the advantages of nonviolent tactics, in contrast to street brawling, is that people who are not able-bodied men are full and equal participants in the fight, rather than being relegated to support roles. That isn’t sufficient reason by itself to prefer nonviolent methods, of course, and I’m definitely not suggesting that violent resistance to fascism is never justified or effective, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind as an opportunity cost of using violent tactics instead of nonviolent ones.

Punching on What Principle?

The foregoing all points toward the conclusion that the primary restriction on Marxist aggression is what they think they can get away with. They advocate punching people like Richard Spencer because they think (correctly) that people are unlikely to defend him, rather than for any principled reason.

It’s often asserted that punching Nazis is okay because they advocate an ideology that is inherently about violence, and that it doesn’t matter that they’re not actively engaged in planning or carrying out genocide right now–they’ve said they support as much, which is good enough. I don’t buy that for a minute. For one thing, by that standard, I’d be justified in rounding up Marxists and murdering them en masse, since they advocate policies which, if implemented, would without exaggeration directly and predictably cause the death of most people now living and a reversion of human society to a pre-industrial condition. In fact, I’d be justified in preemptive violence against almost anyone on the entire political spectrum, apart from pacifists and individualist anarchists.

Now, you might want to concede this point by saying that yes, it’s okay to assault political centrists for endorsing enormities. I’d even be pretty sympathetic to that point–the median voter is a moral monster in his or her politics and probably shouldn’t enjoy total impunity. I don’t think that’s what is going on, though–it seems pretty transparently to be a case of special pleading. The people making the “inherently violent ideology” argument have decided they want to assault people, and arrived at a plausible excuse for doing so.

Other arguments are even less compelling than the “inherently violent ideology” line.

So, at least as far as I can see, there’s no limiting principle here. That makes a liberal alliance with socialists against fascists even more problematic. We can’t simply join the socialists, because our interests are not aligned. They think we’re on the same team as the fascists–tools of the capitalists, class enemies of the proletariat. They’ll turn on us as soon as they think we’re no longer useful. Hide your toothbrush.

Free Speech Extremism Is a Bedrock Liberal Principle

Liberals, unlike socialists, do have reason to want to maintain strong norms against assaulting people who express certain opinions, or even merely hold them. This isn’t because communists and fascists are “better” at violence than us–that’s an open question. It isn’t because it would be a tactical error to turn fascist activists into “martyrs”–it might or might not. It’s because even if we “win” by violently suppressing fascist speech and belief, we lose. It is constitutive of liberalism that liberal societies harbor people with illiberal politics. To say doing so threatens liberalism is to make a category error as blatant as saying that allowing free and open immigration threatens liberalism because immigrants might have bad ideas.

Much has been made, sadly, of the idea that the liberal value of tolerance cannot be extended to those who would undermine the liberal order. This is a dangerous mistake. Jason Kuznicki discussed the so-called “paradox of tolerance” in a piece for Libertarianism.org and did a follow-up interview on the Cato Daily Podcast. If anything, I’d say he understates the case. And if he’s wrong that people have been misreading and misapplying Popper, if Popper really does think maintaining a liberal society ought to involve suppressing intolerance, so much the worse for Popper.

It is of course possible for fascist words to cross the line from protected expression to crime.

“Shoot them,” spoken to a gun-wielding Nazi confronting protesters, is a good example of actionable incitement. https://t.co/99KVII3BDY

— Popehat (@Popehat) October 20, 2017

I have to concede that although I’m suspicious of incitement as a concept, there is probably nothing obviously or necessarily alien to liberalism about forcibly responding to those engaged in incitement, or to those involved in a criminal conspiracy. But these lines should be drawn narrowly and as clearly as possible, not only in outlining what liberals want for American constitutional jurisprudence, but also in considering private action against fascists. This is one of the few areas where American constitutional jurisprudence, is, relatively speaking, pretty libertarian. It would be a shame to mess that up. That way lies “pre-crime” and “preventative detention.” More saliently to the present discussion, I can only repeat that liberals have every reason to hold private actors to similarly stringent restraints on the use of force. Generally, liberal anarchists tend to hold states and private actors to the same moral standards.

Liberals should draw a hard line on freedom of conscience and expression because we must reclaim the mantle of free speech’s most ardent defenders from the alt-right charlatans who cloak themselves in it only as a matter of convenience. It was once widely understood that when the Nazis attempted to march through Skokie, it was the ACLU that was the champion of human freedom, not the fascists. Today, that line has become muddied. We cannot rely on socialists to correct this mistake–they have no wish to correct it. The ACLU itself, once the most reliable hard-line defender of the freedoms of speech and of conscience, has recently shown signs of abandoning its own principled advocacy on speech in favor of Blue Team cheerleading. If the ACLU decides to become MoveOn.org, liberals should be certain that we’re prepared to pick up the fight.

Part of the problem here is that to defend, for example, racist speech, as a practical matter you have to have solid anti-racist bona fides–otherwise your defense of the speech comes across as an endorsement of its content. Libertarians have a lot of work to do on this front, brought on by decades of pandering to right-populists. As part of that, it’s long past time for the total abandonment of Fusionism.

We must always remember that freedom of speech and conscience are foundational liberal principles. If we don’t hold a hard line on them, no one else will.

Some Guiding Principles

The foregoing demonstrates, I think decisively, that libertarians must develop their own anti-fascist praxis, separate and distinct from the strategies adopted by socialists. I have not, however, said much about what a libertarian anti-fascist praxis ought to entail. Part of the reason for that is that it’s a separate topic, and one for which the way must be cleared. Another part is that I frankly don’t know precisely what to do. I’ll be reading my fellow contributors’ pieces with an eye toward getting a clearer sense of the matter.

I can, however, offer some guiding principles. First and foremost, a libertarian anti-fascist praxis must be thoroughgoingly liberal.

I’d also like it to involve, for lack of a better word, harm reduction. The more sanguinary elements of the left have recently embraced the slogan “Make Racists Afraid Again.” The path for liberals, I think, has to be the flipside of this: “Make Non-Whites Feel Safe, If Not Again, Then Perhaps for the First Time.” It’s not as catchy, I know. I’m still workshopping it. The idea is that instilling fear into racists is only useful or desirable to the extent that doing so protects vulnerable people. As such, we should put the protection of the vulnerable at the center of our thinking about anti-fascism, as opposed to the terrorizing and castigation of our political enemies, however much they may deserve it. Can we, for example, insulate immigrants from the threat posed by law enforcement? Can we confront racist or homophobic (etc.) street harassment in a way that’s primarily about ensuring the safety of its targets, rather than sating our own bloodlust? We don’t want to make resisting fascism primarily about what makes us feel good, rather than what most helps fascism’s victims.

Finally, because the threat of “vigilante” fascism is dwarfed by the threat of fascism with political power, libertarian antifascism should incorporate knowledge about the nature and causes of political power and how to disrupt it. Specifically: political power is the ability to compel obedience, and political power is disrupted when that obedience is jeopardized. This is what is so laughable about the idea of a “Resistance” driven by Hillary Clinton and the DNC: a total failure to understand that the core problem is not the present distribution of political power, a mindset that recoils from the possibility that ultimately our very survival may depend on dismantling the apparatus of power before it crushes us–or, more accurately, before we, “preserving the integrity of the democratic process,” “respecting the law of the land,” “just following orders,” crush ourselves.

Di Sheldon Richman. Originale pubblicato il 4 marzo 2016 con il titolo Trump’s Creators. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Il fenomeno Donald Trump è certo una creatura dell’establishment repubblicano, ma non solo.

I leader repubblicani (sostenitori dei privilegi corporativi e di un imperialismo costoso) per decenni hanno fatto leva su una base sciovinista, protezionista, nativista e di altro genere “politicamente scorretto”, che in gran parte hanno finito per dare per scontato. I leader volevano i loro voti, non le loro opinioni. Non credevano che un giorno avrebbero accolto un candidato alla presidenza che avrebbe detto quello che loro pensavano. Hanno sottovalutato Trump e ora sono nei guai seri.

Ma l’élite repubblicana non è l’unico Victor Frankenstein di questa storia. Qualcun altro ha contribuito a dar vita alla creatura Trump: lo stato.

Da anni gli americani si sentono dire che il governo di Washington può gestire con competenza l’economia, le loro pensioni, l’assistenza medica, la cultura (con il controllo dell’immigrazione), e la politica estera. Ma col passare degli anni l’idiozia dello stato è sempre più evidente. Il debito nazionale cresce; il deficit annuale è enorme; pensioni e sanità hanno disponibilità scoperte; ogni tanto c’è una recessione; le tasse sono pesanti; la crescita economica è anemica; e le guerre sono infinite. Ma per chi è protetto i privilegi continuano. La risposta dei politici consiste in salvataggi per i ricchi, gesti simbolici per gli altri e poco altro.

Trump capitalizza su tutto ciò e accusa l’élite di governo di impotenza. Allude spesso a quella che è stata chiamata la sclerosi democratica, e si lamenta del fatto che i politici “parlano e non fanno nulla” (magari!). Al contrario, lui agirebbe deciso. Quando descrive il suo stile da affarista, sembra promettere che sistemerà tutto da solo. Poi parla di compromessi con i democratici al Congresso, ma questo non è il tema della campagna. Il problema dell’America, dice, è che ci sono leader stupidi che non sanno negoziare. Lui sarà un leader intelligente; e l’America tornerà grande.

Ma Trump non capisce le cause della sclerosi democratica, e pertanto sbaglia anche le soluzioni. La sclerosi non è il risultato di una leadership debole, ma del fatto che il governo vuole fare ingegneria sociale. Più il governo ci prova e più affonda nella palude legislativa e dei veti incrociati. Dopo anni di frustrazioni, la gente, ignorante di economia politica, cede all’uomo forte che promette di “fare le cose”.

Nel suo classico La Via della Schiavitù, F. A. Hayek parla di questo particolare pericolo, dello stato che fa ingegneria sociale. Sebbene Hayek metta in guardia dalle conseguenze per la libertà individuale di una pianificazione economica centrale che sostituisca il mercato concorrenziale, la sua analisi vale anche in questo caso. Scrive:

“L’incapacità delle assemblee democratiche di mettere in pratica quello che appare un chiaro mandato popolare porterà inevitabilmente alla sfiducia nelle istituzioni democratiche. I parlamenti saranno considerati “discorsifici” impotenti, incompetenti o incapaci di svolgere il compito per cui sono stati scelti. Cresce la convinzione che, se si vuole pianificare efficacemente, l’azione deve essere “portata fuori dalla politica” e messa nelle mani di esperti, che siano rappresentanti permanenti o entità autonome indipendenti.”

Nel caso di Trump, non si sente parlare di entità autonome di esperti. È Trump a presentarsi come l’esperto, il factotum, quello che non lascerà che i discorsifici intralcino la strada verso la “gloria rinnovata”.

Cosa importante, Hayek aggiunge che “la colpa non è né dei singoli rappresentanti né delle istituzioni parlamentari in quanto tali, ma delle contraddizioni insite nel compito affidato loro” (corsivo aggiunto). Hayek è troppo buono con i politici, ma l’argomento tiene. Gli altri leader non potrebbero fare di meglio perché quello che vorrebbero fare non può essere fatto nell’arena politica, fuori dall’ambito dello scambio volontario e della cooperazione sociale, particolarmente nel libero mercato (senza favoritismi, normative e tasse) dove la concorrenza decentrata e il sistema rivelatore delle perdite e dei profitti segnala gli inevitabili errori e incoraggia le correzioni.

Trump ha ragione: non si può affidare la gestione della nostra vita sociale ai politici. Ma ha anche torto: la società non può essere affidata al Gigante Buono, che sia Trump o qualcun altro.

In conclusione, non dovremmo aspirare ad essere una grande nazione, ma ad essere persone pienamente libere.

Citazioni:

• Sheldon Richman, Trump’s Creators, The Gilmer Mirror, 14-3-2016
• Sheldon Richman, Trump’s Creators, MWC News, 4-3-2016
• Sheldon Richman, Trump’s Creators, NewsLI, 14-3-2016
• Sheldon Richman, Trump’s Creators, Lahaina News, 24-3-2016

Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 26 ottobre 2017 con il titolo When “Restorative Justice” Means Restoring Peace, Not Justice. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Se c’è un punto in cui sono in disaccordo profondo con la sinistra è il fatto che opti sistematicamente per la stabilità, o per l’unità collettiva contro la libera associazione individuale. Purtroppo, gli attivisti di sinistra preferiscono di gran lunga la comunità alla libertà. Tra le conseguenze è la perenne incapacità di affrontare il conflitto, si vede nella divisione e nel “tradimento della pace” un crimine più grande della questione che ha portato alla frattura.

È chiaro nel processo di concertazione, ampiamente distorto così da preservare l’integrità del gruppo a discapito della libertà di associazione dell’individuo. E si vede anche nei richiami alla “giustizia riparatoria”, spesso distorta tanto da diventare una semplice bandiera di chi vuole riportare pace e unità in una comunità; ad ogni costo. Quando la “giustizia riparatoria” è vista in questo modo, l’obiettivo non è più l’eliminazione del danno causato da un violento, o la limitazione del rischio che quest’ultimo rappresenta, ma la canalizzazione del conflitto attorno alla persona violenta verso forme contenute, innocue. L’obiettivo principale di questo genere di “giustizia riparatoria” consiste nell’evitare il conflitto alla luce del sole, la rottura delle amicizie, e così via. In breve, si facilita la vita di quei testimoni a cui non va di dover scegliere da che parte stare.

Ovviamente, una “giustizia riparatoria” deve andare “a vantaggio della vittima”, ma è facile aggirare la questione: basta dire che la “vittima” è un’identità generica e non una persona specifica e chiunque può dichiarare il proprio status di vittima. Questa schifezza è una fottuta costante: un violento, uno stupratore, o chi lo difende, si giustifica dicendo: “Parlo come vittima”… Come se il fatto di essere stato vittima di atti simili giustifichi il crimine in questione. È chiaro che tutto ciò non ha senso, ma funziona perché gli attivisti di sinistra sentono la comunità in questo modo. Farebbero o direbbero qualunque cosa pur di “recuperare” quel senso comunitario, ma non per risarcire la vittima o impedire l’abuso.

Questi aggressori, questi capitalisti sociali che stanno ai vertici delle gerarchie organizzative amano dire “questa non è una giustizia veramente riparatoria” per attaccare i contestatori. “Noi abbiamo creato un processo di riconciliazione pensato appositamente per insabbiare le accuse, e se voi lo rifiutate è perché siete in malafede.” Parlare dell’accaduto è considerato un tradimento. Non importa se comunicare le proprie esperienze a chiunque è un importante “diritto fondamentale”, e non importa se diffondere l’informazione è di cruciale importanza per accrescere la capacità di agire di tutti. “Giustizia riparatoria” ha finito per significare imposizione del silenzio. È la versione anarchista di quelle stantie organizzazioni socialiste che chiedono ai peones di presentare le accuse contro i boss, da cui hanno subito violenze, all’apposita sottocommissione, per poi denunciarli per non aver seguito fino in fondo le sfiancanti procedure interne dell’organizzazione. “Cos’è questo Cointelpro?!” strilla il merdoso di mezza età, terrorizzato dal fatto che il suo potere comincia a vacillare. E così ricomincia l’ondata di post di chi si congratula con se stesso dicendo “è la cultura tossica dello sbugiardamento!”, e chiamando a raccolta chi ha qualche legittima paura ma anche chi preferirebbe non sbugiardare il potere.

Tutti sappiamo che lo sbugiardamento può essere adattato vilmente alle ragioni degli opportunisti sociopatici che cercano di guadagnare capitale sociale, se non di distruggere. E sappiamo anche che condannare qualcuno a priori, escludere chiunque sia anche solo problematico, porta all’isolamento e all’annullamento della persona. Certo ci sono pericoli, ma è irritante il modo in cui chi si annida nel capitale sociale sta distorcendo la critica al capitalismo sociale trasformandola in un’arma da rivolgere contro tutte quelle azioni che ridistribuiscono il capitale sociale. Sbugiardare il maschilista di turno diventa un atto di capitalismo sociale (“vogliono solo acquisire più capitale e cercano di guadagnare argomenti”), mentre non lo è accettare passivamente e sfruttare il capitale sociale? Tutto corretto? Così i complici dell’aggressore usano la loro rete nazionale di amicizie per coprire di insulti la vittima ed in questo non si vede mai capitalismo sociale ma solo una marmaglia di giovani queer che protestano il fatto di essere considerati un branco di iene che fa fuori il capitale sociale; i veri “capitalisti”.

Nella sua forma più comune, la “giustizia riparatoria” premia il silenzio e l’unità a favore dello status quo. Sposta la critica del capitalismo sociale da una critica anarchica delle gerarchie e dei monopoli ad un atteggiamento decisamente non-anarchico contro l’individualismo e la divisione. Visto così, l’errore del capitalismo sarebbe il suo presunto individualismo, la sua fluidità, non la sua rigidità gerarchica. L’emarginazione della vittima, al fine di preservare la solidità della comunità e dell’organizzazione, è la conseguenza naturale di questa visione distorta.

La via all’anarchismo è tortuosa e pericolosa; occorre trovare un percorso che eviti le tante deviazioni che portano al fallimento. Certo, continuando ad escludere gli altri non arriveremo mai al mondo che vogliamo: questo è un tipico errore della cultura dello sbugiardamento. Ma è altrettanto importante capire che, nel breve termine, dobbiamo pur tamponare l’emorragia. Tracciare una linea che metta di là gli stupratori, gli spioni e così via è chiaramente, assolutamente importante. Non abbiamo tutto il tempo e l’energia che vorremmo avere; accettare certe persone spesso significa ipso facto escluderne altre. Gli strumenti e le tattiche adottate nel breve termine non sempre possono essere una prefigurazione esatta dell’utopia che vogliamo realizzare. Anarchia non significa prendersi a cazzotti, ma in certi contesti bisogna alzare le mani. Vogliamo un mondo pieno, ricco di contatti, ma aumentare i contatti significa a volta dover denunciare e aggirare il pericolo.

Non le Aziende e non lo Stato

Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato l’otto marzo 2016 con il titolo People Make Things – Not Corporations, Not Government. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Su Facebook Doug Henwood, autore di Wall Street e direttore del Left Business Observer, parlando di aziende del “settore pubblico” che fanno meglio del “settore privato”, ha citato (3 marzo alle 10:48) l’esempio di un accumulatore ad alta capacità sviluppato dall’agenzia statale Arpa-E. “E poi,” aggiunge, “ c’è la prima videocamera stabilizzata, finanziata da VC, che è merito del settore pubblico.” Il successo in questione sarebbe il “Santo Graal” in fatto di tecnologie d’accumulo elettrico, che potrebbe rendere l’energia solare e le auto elettriche più convenienti, oltre a trasformare la rete di distribuzione elettrica (Suzanne Goldenberg, “US agency reaches ‘holy grail’ of battery storage sought by Elon Musk and Gates”, The Guardian, marzo). Il succo del discorso è che “Arpa-E è all’avanguardia rispetto a Gates e Musk nella corsa multimiliardaria alla batteria di nuova generazione utile alla produzione in centrale e a casa.”

Qualche tempo fa Arthur Chu molto correttamente ha notato su Twitter che non è stato il “capitalismo” a fare l’iPhone e tante altre cose. Nel corso della storia, sotto qualunque ismo, a produrre ogni cosa è stato il lavoratore. L’ismo serve solo a stabilire chi prende i soldi. L’intervento era in risposta ad alcune persone di destra che sbeffeggiavano chi protestava con #ResistCapitalism sul loro iPhone. In realtà, l’iPhone non è stato creato dalla Apple. È stata la conoscenza diffusa e lo spirito di cooperazione sociale dei suoi dipendenti a crearlo. La Apple ha semplicemente applicato la “proprietà intellettuale” all’hardware e al software al fine di mantenere conoscenze tecnologiche e cooperazione entro le mura aziendali. Sostanzialmente, la Apple fa da gabelliere tra lavoratori informatici e designer aziendali da una parte, e i laboratori che producono l’hardware in Cina dall’altra, esigendo tributi da entrambi.

E se il “capitalismo” e le “aziende” non creano nulla, lo stesso vale per le agenzie governative. Henwood che esulta per il “settore pubblico” è l’immagine speculare di chi a destra esulta per la Apple. Entrambi sono senza senso.

Io non credo che “settore pubblico” e “settore privato” significhino davvero qualcosa a queste condizioni. In entrambi i casi, il lavoro è svolto da esseri umani in carne ed ossa tramite quello che l’antropologo David Graeber, in Debt, chiama “comunismo quotidiano”, ovvero tramite la cooperazione e la condivisione delle informazioni. Tutte le conquiste attribuite a sistemi gerarchici istituzionali, che siano aziendali o statali, sono in realtà opera di gruppi paritetici formati da persone che cooperano tra loro, e che tengono in piedi l’attività nonostante le interferenze dall’alto e le scelte irrazionali dei manager ai vertici della gerarchia. La cosa più importante non è capire qual’è il sistema gerarchico che si intromette meno, ma eliminare il sistema gerarchico tout court.

Se talvolta le istituzioni gerarchiche statali o aziendali sono servite, è stato quando potevano essere giustificate dalle dimensioni degli investimenti e degli impianti da amministrare, o dai costi di transazione generati da operazioni di vasta scala che coinvolgevano molte migliaia di persone. Entrambe queste giustificazioni sono, o stanno diventando rapidamente, obsolete. Per quanto riguarda il design, assente la “proprietà intellettuale” della Apple, tutto ciò che si fa all’interno dell’azienda potrebbe essere fatto a livello paritario da comunità che producono software e hardware open-source. Quanto alla produzione, la Apple non fa che affidare la produzione manifatturiera di ciò che è stato progettato dai suoi dipendenti ad imprese indipendenti dall’altra parte dell’oceano.

Grazie al possesso della “proprietà intellettuale”, la Apple riesce a bloccare le relazioni orizzontali tra progettisti e produttori, e scremare un profitto. Può usare il suo diritto monopolistico di disporre del prodotto per vendere computer e smartphone, fatti interamente da altri, con un margine molto, molto al di sopra dei costi di produzione.

La Apple, l’azienda, è un parassita. Tutto quello che fa potrebbe essere fatto da produttori paritari che distribuiscano gratuitamente schemi hardware e software a chiunque voglia servirsene, con laboratori indipendenti, gestiti dagli stessi lavoratori, che producono l’hardware ovunque nel mondo ci sia richiesta.

Similmente, ci sono persone ignoranti che esaltano la creazione della dorsale di internet da parte dell’Arpa, citandola come un trionfo del “socialismo”, come se ogni attività posseduta o diretta dallo stato debba essere celebrata come esempio di “socialismo”. Certo è socialismo, ma non del genere che intendono loro. Le persone che hanno sviluppato Arpanet e internet condividevano una cultura interna, dal carattere cooperativo e paritario, fondamentalmente in contrasto con la mentalità dei burocrati del Pentagono per cui teoricamente lavoravano. Sono state le loro relazioni umane orizzontali, il loro “comunismo quotidiano”, a fare internet, e a porre le basi dell’ethos del World Wide Web.

Sbagliano entrambi, chi a destra prende in giro l’hashtag #ResistCapitalism e chi come Henwood si entusiasma per il “settore pubblico”, e sbagliano per ragioni molto simili. Bisogna riconoscere il ruolo centrale che ha la libertà e la capacità d’agire dell’uomo nell’edificare un mondo migliore, gettando nella spazzatura il nesso stato-aziende con tutte le loro istituzioni sfruttatrici.

Citazioni:

• Kevin Carson, People make things: Not corporations, not government, Augusta Free Press, 19-3-2016
• Kevin Carson, People Make Things — Not Corporations, Not Government, P2P Foundation Blog, 24-3-2016
• Kevin Carson, People Make Things — Not Corporations, Not Government, NewsLI, 21-3-2016

For years we’ve relied on webhosting from 1984 Hosting, a small radical project based out of Iceland. We moved to 1984 from our old provider after a racist by the name of Olivier Janssens took us offline with a DMCA so spurious it made international news. 1984 has been good to us, but unfortunately last Wednesday their entire server infrastructure suddenly collapsed. You can read more about the unusual situation and the severity of it here.

We’ve spent the last week waiting for good news on what’s recoverable. As you can see our backup of the site has been restored on a temporary server with no missing stories, although a few months of images and files are presently lost. What this has meant however is an interruption in our Mutual Exchange symposium and outages on Wednesday and Thursday as we waited for a damage report and then went through the process of restoration.

Part 1: FASCIST RHETORIC

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.

– “Murray” in Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook”

Fascist ideology has crawled its way into the mainstream yet again. Amidst this resurgence is a concomitant escalation of paramilitary brownshirts deploying a rhetoric of “free speech” and using it to justify ever increasing violence against perceived enemies. While the ability to freely express oneself is a critical part of a thriving society, there are other freedoms at play as well. When we discuss the unique memetic qualities of fascism, we see that free speech is of paramount importance, but it comes with both responsibilities and a network of implications for other related freedoms.

What is fascism?

Fascism is an anti-enlightenment, authoritarian hyper-nationalism. It attempts a populist left-right syncretism that employs codewords and ideas typically coupled with both the left (anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-war, labor syndicalism, socialism, collectivism, etc.) and the right (anti-communism, private property, authoritarianism, nationalism, traditionalism, individualism, corporatism, etc.). It typically names a temporarily disenfranchised natural elite and then appeals to some mythical archetype of their resurgence (palingenesis). Fascism attempts to instill obedience to a mythologized tribal identity. It presents itself as a call to reawaken or refashion a vital group consciousness that modern values have deceived people into forgetting, leading to spiritual decay and degeneracy. The vector for this deceit is always a subversive fifth column (Liberals, Jews, Cultural Marxists). Fascism presents itself as a loyal rebellion, a revolt against unnatural cosmopolitan forces on behalf of some presumed authentic tribal spirit. It touts rejuvenation through glorious violence and aggressive conformity.

Highly opportunistic and mutable, fascist movements can adopt virtually anything as their governing memeplex. They can shift seamlessly from brazen Islamophobia to an only partially ironic call for white Sharia law. There are state-centric fascisms, such as authoritarian socialism, and anti-state versions, such as the fascist creep amongst anarchocapitalist-libertarians or amongst the post-left. There are religious fascists and atheist fascists. There are Mongolian neo-Nazis who exalt Genghis Khan and Mexican fascists who want a new Aztec Empire. There are gay fascists who idolize the Spartan warrior and Christian fascists who believe white people are the lost tribes of Israel. Many Black nationalist extremists, such as the Black Hebrew Israelites, fit the bill for fascist politics. Although oppressed black, brown, and native nationalisms are more complicated than white and colonizer nationalisms, certain Native leaders have themselves aligned with the white-supremacist and bio-regionalists such as the National-Anarchist Movement and make the speaking tour of neo-Nazi events, much like the Nation of Islam allied with the Klan.  There is significant fascist entryism in the Pagan, heathen, and neo-folk communities which have responded with their own niche internal resistance movements. The Brahmin Hinduvatna caste terrorists often tick the boxes. The Islamic State’s vision of a totalitarian Caliphate is glaringly fascist from its centralized economic controls and pseudo-socialism to its hardcore ethno-nationalist authoritarianism. Japan, of course, has a deep and troubled history of fascist creep. In many ways the U.S. and several European nations lead the charge in the normalization of fascism in the modern era, but they are certainly not alone.

Many interwar fascist movements made use of Leninist organizing principles and propaganda, looking to the Bolshevik state for inspiration. Some, like Mussolini and other Italian fascists, came from socialist and trade unionist backgrounds and were even inspired by the anarcho-syndicalists. However, these fascists rejected Marxism’s materialist methodology and its internationalism. To the extent that Mussolini and Hitler approved of Stalin’s USSR, it was precisely because they thought (like modern National-Bolsheviks (NazBol) such as Putin’s pet advisor Aleksander Dugin or the Strasserites), that it had successfully jettisoned the universalistic “Jewish” ideas of Marx and Lenin and transformed itself into a Slavic ultranationalism that they could understand. When modern white-supremacists express admiration for states like Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (itself an ethno-nationalist regime that supports Western neo-Nazis), it’s for their militarism and national self-sufficiency rather than their professed goals of egalitarianism and world revolution. Richard Spencer, strangely but unsurprisingly, denied the Holodomor genocide which is a tankie team signal that fits with his, David Duke’s, Baked Alaska’s and other white supremacist’s such as the Charlottesville murderer James Fields’, love for Syria’s brutal, pseudo-socialist dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

#StandWithAssad pic.twitter.com/xiRnI1OXcW

— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) April 7, 2017

Likewise, when the alt-right position themselves as defenders of Western civilization and capitalism, what they mean to defend is the legacy of dominance by white men and the hierarchy and discipline they associate with the corporate firm and nuclear family. When presented with the notion that free markets erode traditional hierarchies and facilitate cross-cultural mobility, the fascists immediately seeks exceptions, attempting bizarre and unrealistic justifications of border controls and racist exclusion policies through a perverted libertarian lexicon of property rights. Increasingly they drop any pretext and just declare themselves authoritarian nationalists with free market characteristics. They reject existing “globalism,” not because it is an inconsistent smokescreen for coercively managed trade and migration, but because the freedom that it offers is already too much.  Liberties, whether freedom of movement or freedom of speech, are just exploitable tools for maintenance of the status and integrity of their tribe. No fascist truly values universalist, cosmopolitan freedom. In a sense, fascism is a rejection of ethics and an embrace of opportunistic nihilism.

As varied and contradictory as it appears, fascism is neither indefinable nor purely subjective. The essential features of palingenetic tribalism, anti-cosmopolitanism, and anti-rationalism underlie all of these incarnations.

Memetic Viruses and Hazards

The original definition of “meme” is a self-replicating cultural block of information, e.g. “this book is true, and there is virtue in promulgating it.” Memetics is the study of memes. This isn’t just macro images with Impact font; it’s any type of cultural information, such as a handshake, idea, language, tradition, or bit of art. Memetics allows us to apply the insights of evolution and information theory to things like ideologies and social dynamics. Within the field of memetics we look at the virality or infectiousness of various memes, or, rather, how rapidly they can spread and with what degree of severity. The metaphor of epidemiology continues throughout our discussion as we discuss memetic viruses, inoculation, and tolerance.

A memetic hazard is described as:

…information with three main attributes. The first attribute is that it spreads from person to person, whether through personal contact or some form of recording. The second attribute is that this information causes some form of distress, whether as benign as mental stress to the individual [auto-toxic] or as dangerous as societal dysfunction [exo-toxic]. The third attribute is that it must cause preoccupation–that is to say, it maintains sufficient presence in the host’s mind that either a significant portion of his attention remains focused on it, or it plays a significant part in his decision-making process.

A memetic hazard is an information hazard that presents a strong possibility of negative impact. These can be divided into two groups: those arising from true information and those that arise from misleading or untrue information, such as nationalist propaganda. Obviously not every infectious meme is malicious, nor does every infectious meme cause distress — a large class of preoccupying considerations can cause us pain while still encapsulating valid concerns. One example of a truly malicious meme would be dishonest propaganda in service to a self-compounding irrational fear of vaccinations, leading to outbreaks of formerly repressed diseases. In reality, we often see mixtures of feedback dynamics from both true and false information in the more malicious infectious memes that we seek to combat.

Unlike memetic hazards, there are also net-beneficial memes such as those favoring game theoretic cooperation strategies, or “resistance memes” which are useful in overcoming deleterious memetic hazards. Certain “good” memes can even create a positive feedback loop that encourages or rewards actions leading toward greater truth or beneficial behavior.

The most viral meme is an undeniable truth, in that, once it is seen, it is very difficult or impossible to fully ignore. However, truth is held differently by different viewers. So more accurate would be to say that, the most viral meme is one that speaks to a reality of which the viewer was not previously aware or, a reality to which the viewer was aware, but unable to contextualize, accept, or put into words. These realizations may produce intense preoccupation and may even impose a negative utility value (such as the loss of community) upon recognizing and rejecting the lies of a cult in which one is enmeshed. Atheism itself is an infectious meme that, despite the suffering it may cause, is generally a proactive step for human realization. Again though, due to human limits and failures, even something like atheism has been turned gross by the so-called “New Atheism” movement which bulldozes over indigenous and other marginalized persons in their blind pursuit of a vision of “Truth” which, on closer inspection, more aptly resembles a desire for continued domination filtered through their own glaring racial biases. 

As a memetic hazard, fascism can be beneficial to the individual (auto-beneficial) while simultaneously being dangerous to those nearby (exo-toxic), which makes it uniquely infectious and dangerous. Fascism creates its own power-seeking reward system and set of confirmation biases for its host, which makes it a uniquely difficult memetic virus to combat.

Fascism as Memetic Hazard

Fascism is less of a coherent ideology or set of ideologies than it is a cascading epistemological system failure. Its influence, when presented without proper context, serves to compromise the ability of the host mind to tolerate difference and to prioritize persuasion over violent antagonism. Writ large, it eventually compromises the conditions of free speech and rational discourse that it exploits.

It begins with the invention of a mythic identity.  This identity is under threat, not just by foreign cultures but anti-cultural subversives.  These influences are intent on killing the host, or causing it to forget what it is, thereby lowering its natural defenses against external influence and setting it on a path to self-destruction.  To defend itself, the identity must cleanse itself and reinforce obedience to to its own imperatives. Cleanliness is achieved through political violence, and obedience through the cooptation and subordination of all ideas and information channels to the identity’s surrounding memeplex.

In the macroscopic political and social realm, this often entails the gross mechanisms of state power and media control, but these are merely fractal outgrowths of the resculpted fascist mind.  Fascism is always and already a threat even when it is “just an idea”.

Purity and Scotsmen: The fascist identity is essentially pure and flawless. It is never responsible for its own failings and mediocrity, but is always the victim of subversive influence by an unfalsifiable external conspiracy. Fascism is a black box concept, mythologized and obfuscated by vague definitions and deliberate fuzziness. In it’s perfect purity, there is also the seamless ability for the fascist to distance themselves from anything less than their non-existent ideal through the No True Scotsman fallacy which says, “A real Scotsman [fascist] would never do that” and then continuously moves the goalposts of debate. This all renders it difficult to confront fascism through rational debate, because it is deliberately evasive.

Genetic Fallacies and Epistemic Closure: Fascism understands ideas as expressions of identity, of the essence of a race or tribe. Ideas, in this worldview, are cultural artifacts defined by their origin and cannot be judged apart from this.  Fascist concepts of science and philosophy are inherently relativist. They aren’t construction processes that all humans can and do contribute toward; they are merely the expression of one group’s essence (and assumed superiority or inferiority). For example, “Western science is the best because Western people are the best.” The host begins to see ideas purely as bludgeons or tools for social positioning. This imposes epistemic closure and defense mechanisms against other memetic threats.

The Impossibility of Dialogue: Fascists believe that tolerance and persuasion are only possible within the bounds of the one’s own people. The fascist social media response of “reeeeee” or “shill” at anything a supposed “commie” says is a form of this evasion. On 8chan pol rules they say things like, “The jew will only tell a truth if it benefits a greater lie. The jew, when caught in a lie, will create a new narrative and purposefully skip a logical step to twist the narrative in his favor, then double down on the new lie and never admit to the omitted logical step even upon pain of death.” This is an easy opt-out because anyone in the outgroup is just a “Jew” who can be dismissed. The tribe itself is strictly delineated and internally policed to keep ideas within acceptable bounds. Interactions between insiders and outsiders are understood only in terms of mutual antagonism. Where cooperation with out-group people is necessary, there is a tacit agreement to keep things at arm’s length so as to minimize contamination. This particular worldview becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, perpetually sabotaging conditions of peaceful openness and transmitting itself from one group to another through violence and reaction, much like the intergenerational cycle of abuse within families (which, of course, is also non-deterministic). This is all the more ironic considering the front of “peaceful free speech” they use to justify their right to platforms.

Teamspeak and Anti-Intellectualism: Detached intellects that value truth over team-alignment are understood by fascists as saboteurs. These are the fifth columnists; the Liberals, the Jews, the Cultural Marxists. Much of the nerd-hate perpetrated by the left and the “autistic screeching” memes of the right invoke this caricature of people who, oblivious to social expectations and propriety, won’t easily pigeonhole themselves and simply declare themselves to be for one team or the other. They advance subversive ideas to the detriment of the natural order. This is why — despite having its own loyal intellectuals — fascism is at core an anti-intellectual phenomenon, and why the purported iconoclasm of fascist mouthpieces is subordinate to that.

Fake News: Fascist power structures seek to constantly control the narrative. A free press or internet will always be a threat to authoritarianism which is why they are usually the first things crushed. In the rise to power a fascist must strive to discredit all sources of information critical to their cause but once they have seized power they can simply destroy the opposition and need not resort to the same levels of dishonesty. In the Trump era where reputable, if biased, mainstream media sources are carte blanche labeled “fake news” we have entered into a post-truth era of political smarminess. Even though there is a contradictory Trump tweet to nearly any of his abhorrent decisions, the truth doesn’t matter like the the personality does. Honesty, consistency, or integrity are impediments to power. With power comes the ability to create and mold what is perceived as truth, which to the fascist mind, is more important than actual truth. This step of conquering truth is necessary to overshadowing the cognitive biases and inevitable betrayals rendered by fascist leaders. But as it serves the leaders, it also serves their followers who can dismiss out-of-hand anything with which their sacred mythos does not align.

Iconoclasm and the Illusion of Discovery: Fascists often style themselves as the unpopular messengers of common-sense truths. This provides both a rush and sense of certainty, but sharply limits inquiry beyond a certain point. “Common sense”, after all, tells one that the world is flat. The need to limit oneself to seemingly obvious truisms, to obtain peer approval and the exhilaration of shock value, creates a selection bias toward content that upsets enemies and placates friends. The content, however, rarely has any essential correlation to truth value. In reality, the host merely seeks validation from its peers.

Nihilism and Cognitive Dissonance: Because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistency in fascism, it necessarily encourages the host to become comfortable with inconsistency and intellectual dishonesty. Ideas come to hold no value apart from their ability to bind and motivate a tribe, which varies from one context to another. This in turn functions as a kind of “nuclear option” defense mechanism; when a person strenuously disagrees with them or attempts to show the arbitrary nature of their utility function, they can simply be written off as just a hostile tribe member engaged in the same signalling they are. This is why fascists are able to cooperate with other nationalists even when they hold wildly different characteristics, while remaining mutually hostile to anyone attempting to change their minds. In reality this looks like many fascists holding wildly contradictory values (like Libertarianism and statist border militarism) in a way that may encourage sympathy with some parts of their communicated belief system.

Appeal to Probability/Possibility: The fascist will to power is consistently obscured or justified using the facile assertion that domination is inevitable, therefore it is prudent to dominate first and better. Also known as the “Inevitability Fallacy”, the Appeal to Probability shows how fascist rhetoric creates a false sense of deterministic fatalism and utilizes the co-occurring nihilism to fill the power vacuum through brutality and false promise. The vulgarly perverted natural selection belief that you cannot limit, only rearrange and purify power structures, serves to pinch out the spark of creative resistance and imaginative parallel construction in a similar way to the fatalism of many religions that deny individual agency.

Anchoring Bias: Anchoring bias is an essential aspect of what makes fascism and its deployment of “free speech” arguments so dangerous. People’s minds have a tendency to put things that they’ve heard in succession in generally the same arena. We anchor to what’s been said and don’t adequately compensate for the difference. This is like when people argue that creationism should be taught beside evolution in the classroom on the basis that even evolution is “just a theory.” The problem is that evolution has proven itself to be vastly more reliable at predicting and accounting for the actual evidence– this means it has more truth-value. Teaching them side-by-side gives the false impression that they are somehow equal on the grounds of both being “theories”. Then, even someone who rejects creationism may not adequately counter-balance against its narrative. The liberal media has a tendency to think that giving white nationalists large-scale public platforms is a form of democratic dialogue. What this really does is create an anchoring bias where the truth is seen as “somewhere in between” literally genociding minorities and being against that (“Antee-fuh are the real fascists!”). This tendency gives what should be seen as absurdist insults to human intelligence and ethics, large-scale recruitment and propaganda pedestals. Receiving a flood of propaganda, most people are unable to adequately counter-balance against the information they are hearing. This is not a justification for statist censorship which is a trap as well. An even more apt example of the impact of this is when anti-vaxxers are treated as having an equal and legitimate position to those favoring credible research. In this case, as in platforms for fascism, a memetically hazardous ideology is given the opportunity to reproduce and create the foundation for incalculable increases in human suffering and unnecessary death. Fascists may deserve free speech, but at the appropriate level to the quality and legitimacy of their ideology… which is roughly tin-can phones between two dumpsters (although they do sully the dumpsters). This approach leaves us free to support free speech while also criticizing and resisting the ways it’s sometimes utilized.

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Fascism, by way of its epistemological footprint described above, is a self-referential mass of implicit premises that work to poison the wells of knowledge and freedom. Fascists seek to neutralize precisely those ideas that allow for free speech to work and for good ideas to supplant bad ones.  It’s a cognitive dead end, as epistemologically complete as any cult psychology but far more externally violent. It is simultaneously immensely stupid and stupefying, and incredibly dangerous, in the way that a zombie apocalypse is.

Fascism appeals not through reason, but by routing around reason. Everything does this to a degree, and that is why critical thinking is an essential practice. However, not everything comes with such a complete package of exploits, providing such an advanced firewall of defensive mechanisms and such a propensity to snowball once a critical mass of adherents get together.  It’s for these reasons together that we cannot just rely on inoculating the public through real education, but also must suppress and contain the spread of fascist memes. This is also why we can (to a limited extent) ethically justify deploying memes of our own which leverage monkey-brain cognitive defects to form effective defenses against fascist programming. More important even than freedom of speech is freedom of information which is blocked by fascist discourse and practices of governance. Resisting dynamics such as fascism that form epistemic closures is in line with the complexity creation that free-speech advocates claim to value. Should we tell the fascism-advocating free-speech advocates what happens to free speech rights under fascism?

Part 2: FREE SPEECH

What is Free Speech?

One of the main gravitational nodes in the U.S. free speech debate goes back to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who stated, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” This quote, endlessly abused and misremembered, is, none the less, a flashpoint in the struggle for a free speech that acknowledges the role speech acts may have in creating harm. This quote is often used to justify mass censorship and overreach from government agencies and their interpretation of the Constitution. However, the quote also fails to clearly lay out that, what is actually being restricted is not speech itself, but the instigation of violence. You have the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater but you can also be held responsible for the direct levels of impact that it causes. The chaos that yelling “fire” causes impinges on other sets of rights, and as such does not exist in a vacuum.

Furthermore, as Rothbard (who later turned “race realist” under Lew Rockwell’s influence) and Mises (who is currently rolling in his grave at his cult following of closed-border “libertarian fascists”) often noted, this lens is generally one of property rights in which you have a spoken or unspoken agreement with the property owner who, should you break this agreement, has the right to remove the welcome they offered you to their home, business, or, as it were, movie theater. However, the nation-state does not constitute a tract of private property and as such, the government cannot imprison people for speaking out against war, as it did in the original court-case, US v. Schenck, to which the quote about ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’ is attributed.

That case set precedent for a number of other Red Scare trials that utilized the Espionage Act to incarcerate numerous non-violent war resisters and those affiliated with Left political causes. Long before that though none other than Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in 1917 for agitating subversion against the draft. The Brandenburg vs. Ohio case in 1969 stated that, “that inflammatory speech–and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan–is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech ‘is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action’”.  This is a critical point in that something must be both actionable and likely to be undertaken in order to justify repression, which means that the language itself is no longer the problem but the incidents that it causes. This may be a difficult distinction to make for those immersed in a more historically libertarian understanding of violence that excludes speech acts, and yet it need not be. The speech acts are not the crime, but rather the violence they cause. In fact, this was never even a law and the bizarre and fascistic interpretation of the constitution from the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio which was overturned over 40 years ago.

This logic of tracing the actual aggression to its source extends to non-verbal language such as sign language or even just walking around non-violently in the audience and blocking everyone’s view or jumping up and down noiselessly but still breaking ones agreements with the property owner. As Justice Hugo Black said, “If a person creates a disorder in a theater, they would get him there, not because of what he hollered but because he hollered. They would get him not because of any views he had, but because they thought he did not have any views that they wanted to hear there. That is the way I would answer. Not because of what he shouted but because he shouted.” The logic of this puzzle of rights extends into numerous other questions such as the “chairman’s problem” which asks whether each person is awarded the right to be given a space for speech by the chairman of a gathering should they have an opinion. The answer of course being: no way, or at least not by government mandate. We should have the right to petition and resist for the inclusion of minority voices, but when the government is given the power to make these decisions for people it inevitably results in massive over-step.

When Ann Coulter called UC Berkeley a “graveyard for the first amendment” for not awarding her a platform, she misunderstood (or calculatedly misrepresented) the first amendment, the legal precedent surrounding it, the “Chairman’s Problem”, and the relationship between protected free speech but illegal instigations of violence . The crux of the modern battle for free speech is around what constitutes a legitimate threat and is framed in terms of a divide between “free speech” and “hate speech” in which the Overton window itself is the battlefield. Of course, incitement and legitimacy of threat with regard to “hate speech” are very murky concepts liable to be abused and pushed to the limits by every opportunist around. All of the slopes are slippery especially when you consider something like intimidation as in the case of The National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie in which the Supreme Court ruled that neo-Nazis had the right to assemble and march through the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. The factor of intimidation is escalated when combined with open-carry protections and calls for armed anti-Jewish paramilitary shows of force such as those instigated by Andrew Anglin in Richard Spencer’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana on MLK day (and named in honor of his assassin). In that case, the march never even happened but still managed to incite the chaos of “yelling fire in a crowded theater.” In the age of trolling and 8chan armies, the line between physical and informational threats are further blurred.

The irony of both Coulter’s statements and the right’s recent acquisition of the free speech rhetoric is that historically, free speech was fought and died for by the left and centered around none other than the radicals on the UC Berkeley campus. In 1964, members of Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), war-tired from resisting Klansmen and the like across the country, set about attempting to protect the free speech of political dissidents from collegiate and governmental censorship with a wide range of radical political tactics. Countless persons had been dragged before the House for Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) as part of COINTELPRO and the Red Scare and charged as “subversives”. These original radical groups banded with others to form the Free Speech Movement, otherwise known as the FSM. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Seth Rosenfeld revealed, “ties between the FBI, COINTELPRO, and Ronald Reagan.” and that “Of the three hundred FBI agents who were active in Northern California in 1964, forty-three were assigned to infiltrate, monitor, and if possible, sabotage and neutralize those people J. Edgar Hoover deemed ‘subversive.’” So continued the illegal monitoring of Black radicals and professors alike, accused of wildly exaggerated or completely imagined crimes and charged accordingly in order to suppress their speech and truth-telling. Reagan went so far in his resistance of the Berkeley radicals as to say that the demands of the “Beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” had far exceeded their limits and needed to be stopped. This all culminated in Sproul Plaza when non-violent protesters were tear-gassed, beaten, and one person, James Recter, was shot by the police with buckshot, which Reagan then blamed on the protestors themselves. As the years drug on, the FSM continued to resist forcefully and against great violence for their right to speech. In only a few years, they would bear witness to both Bloody Thursday and the Kent State massacre.

Given knowledge of this history, it is ironic and sad that free speech, as it was pushed in favor of Black, Brown, LGBT, and other rights in the UC Berkeley FSM, has in turn become nearly synonymous with the “right to offend”. Furthermore, a recent study by the University of Kansas found that explicit racial prejudice is a reliable predictor of the “free speech defense” of racist expression in a variety of controlled settings. Several experiments showed that “the justification of racist speech by endorsing fundamental political values can serve to buffer racial and hate speech from normative disapproval” in the form of a Justification-Suppression model. This means that people using free speech arguments to defend racist speech are not motivated so much by principle, as by a basic self-defense of their racism to a reliable and predictable degree.

Free speech is one of the most important aspects of an evolving memetic ecosystem. It enables ideas to compete on the free market and be tested in reality to determine which hypotheses (maps) yield the most significant correlations with reality (the territory). The quality of speech is measured in it’s ability to pay rent in evidence. Complexity of narratives through cultural-miscegenation leads to intellectual and cultural evolution in the iron-forge of memetic entanglements. The tricky part of this is that some speech-acts are being utilized in order to mobilize the mass slaughter and disenfranchisement of innocent people. Which is really, objectively, shitty. What began as a struggle for dignity and socio-political access has been hijacked by people who just want to use it for fascist and racist political violence and a personal will-to-power. It is crucial that the broader anti-authoritarian movement reclaim the struggle for free-speech while simultaneously contextualizing it amidst the complex realities of violence, both structural and interpersonal in nature. As a matter of historical fact, if radicals of many stripes fail to uphold the struggle for free speech, it will return as it has in the past, to imprison and incarcerate our movements. Fortunately, being on the side of liberatory struggle, those who oppose authoritarianism and ethno-violence have a claim of legitimacy to what could be otherwise considered “subversive” free speech. If this all isn’t clear enough for you, while the right cries about Ann Coulter’s loss of a pedestal as a free speech crisis, many from the left are facing decades in jail for protesting the trump inauguration while wearing black. This is why we must protect free speech.

Why Fascism is Uniquely Dangerous, Especially in Conditions of Free Speech

Lots of political ideologies involve small-minded drones marching in lockstep obedience to a flag as a means to an end.  There’s something profoundly different about people for whom that is the end.

Fascism is a social technology that carries a special seductiveness for the human animal. Think of it as a particularly dangerous cult psychology, creating a self-referential bubble narrative that supplies easy answers to complex problems and a sense of strength through belonging and performative hate. Even smart people fall for cults and employ motivated reasoning to defend and advance the cult’s memeplex, never bothering to question the core identity or why they should value it.

Most identities do this to an extent, but are either much more vulnerable to critical thinking, or they are ‘woo (new-age mysticism cults)’ that only hurts willing converts. Fascism as violent, refined, anti-thought is neither of those things. It’s those two factors (invulnerability and exo-toxicity) in combination that make it uniquely dangerous. It’s neither vulnerable to dialogue nor something that can be safely ignored and tolerated.  Dialogue and tolerance are the preferred weapons of open societies with conditions of free speech. This is a major vulnerability.

Fascism is particularly dangerous to societies with even a smidgen of freedom. Freedom creates complexity and diversity. Fascists fear and despise that like nothing else does, and the mechanisms that complex free societies excel at using to defuse bad ideas, don’t work well against rapidly snowballing mobs of drunk, insular lizard brains. They can very easily get to the level of murder and terrorism before liberal institutions reluctantly accept that throwing facts at zombies does not work.

That’s why fascism merits special attention, even when it doesn’t look like the most immediate threat. Communist regimes have killed more people. Capitalist regimes have also killed more people. Fascist regimes are unstable and suck at keeping the trains running on time. But while they exist, the damage they can wreak on not just human bodies, but also the human mind and its works is simply unparalleled, and they can crop up with an unmatched speed and intensity, as these last years have shown.

Violence and Fascist Free Speech

Free speech or die, Portland. You’ve got no safe place. This is America. Get out if you don’t like free speech. Death to the enemies of America. Death to antifa [antifascists]. You call it  terrorism. I call it patriotism. Die.

-Jeremy Christian

The above quote comes from Jeremy Christian’s arraignment for slitting the throats of two people, and serious injury of one other, who protected two Muslim women from Christian’s rage on the MAX train in Portland. The audience included Micah Fletcher who was hospitalized and nearly killed by Christian in the incident. One of the people attending his trial wore red shoelaces, a white supremacist code for someone who has drawn blood in the white nationalist struggle. Christian was already a known white-supremacist in the Portland scene though long before these murders. Christian attended the “March for Free Speech” organized by Joey Gibson some months earlier wearing a U.S. American flag, having previously posted about a desire to kill antifa. At the rally he was repeatedly yelling racial slurs including the n-word and throwing fascist salutes. Christian’s version of Gibson’s movement was a bit too explicitly extremist though and so even Gibson asked him to leave.

Christian’s instability and political syncretism mark the perfect fascist assassin. He voted for Bernie (a known anti-immigrant, soft nationalist) and then switched to heavily supporting Trump although registered as a Libertarian. Christian ticked all the other boxes too though, including: being a self-avowed nihilist, Nordic Pagan, and believer in the Cascadia white nationalist (Vinland) movement. His emotional instability itself is the perfect scapegoat for the fact that he is an obvious extension of fascist ideals. The right wing press quickly and tactically moved to dishonestly condemn him as a far leftist extremist with mental health issues, while the chans and Stormfront held him up as a hero. Neo-nazi provocateur Andrew Anglin published on his site, the Daily Stormer that, “Well, probably he was defending himself against attackers. He’s going to need a good lawyer. Hopefully he knows better than to talk to the cops. Again, it has to be said: when our people attack their people (if that indeed is what happened), the reason is the same as when the opposite happens: it is because they are in our countries in the first place.” In this grotesque quote Anglin claims Christian as “one of us” and blames the victims for defending the Muslims who ‘shouldn’t have been in the country.’ The link between fascist free-speech and violent terrorism however is not a new one. Rather, it is a clear historical trend.

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It is possible to critique, support, and engage in antifascist activity all at the same time. However, a lot of the pushback against antifa misses the major historical point that middle to high level speech acts aren’t usually just speeches; they’re almost always explicit or implicit paramilitary commandments. Hitler’s first Putsch started in a beerhall speech where he declared National Revolution. He took notes from Mussolini’s “populist pageantry”. The SS, the SA, Freikorps, etc were all mobilized through speeches like this. People get vague on this point and say “Oh, we know there exists some connection between fascist speech and recruitment or incitement to violence” and act as if this is just a loose correlation. The Overton shift is primarily necessary in order to create space to both recruit, mobilize, and command paramilitary actions with increased normalization. The dweebs on 8ch (our modern nazi beer-halls) know this and discuss it openly and with intention but the liberal left, centrists, and conservative right don’t seem to get it.

You can’t just go straight from an Obama presidency to 5,000 non-state Nazis with AR-15s goose-stepping down main streets in large cities across the country even if you do have implicit support for white-nationalism coming from the highest office in the U.S. government. People have to be eased into it and the Nazis need a safety bubble to overcome the vulnerable aspects of trying to signal strength while they’re still just a stupid little niche racist movement. Yet, in the recent past we’ve already seen a drastic uptick in marchers, decked out for physical battle, and sporting Nazi iconography in a way that would’ve seemed less plausible only a few years ago in the U.S.. Then, the tragedies (1, 2) and incredibly escalated and openly fascist show of force in Charlottesville really drove the point home for a lot of people.

Historically, paramilitary mobilization of vets, the disgruntled youth, and political leaders has all happened on the platform. The National Front organized the boneheads in France to start marching because having an armed and trained contingent made them seem like a valid group rather than just some out-there right-nationalist party. Fascist violence starts with a speech where people find a sense of strength and maybe a bunch of people conceal carry weapons or beat up some minorities afterwards and meet a couple other peckerwoods that were in a different county jail. The bigger the crowd of more acceptably racist and middle of the road fascists, the more the hardcore people who are willing to build the perception of fascist strength through violence will be crawling in the midst. Richard Spencer wrote to antifa on twitter, “Our message is WE WILL CRUSH YOU.” Likely meant as a power signalling rebuttal to his incessant ability to get punched, hurt, or kicked out of events. This facade of power is a response to the fascist lust for it, summed up with compelling honesty by one poster when he said, “We feel emasculated. Many of us feel we have never had power. We crave power. We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will give us power. A group that will confirm our worth as men. We do not have identities. We want identities.” Regardless of their frailty though, when they say they want war, they mean it.

The problem is, even if it’s unethical somehow to resist speech violence (assuming even that no direct or implicit commands of violence were given) once the paramilitary aspects supporting these strong man figures have been able to mobilize, we’ve already lost a major battle and possibly the war. Once a formalized paramilitary outfit, with strong relationships to the state military forces and police is created, they’re able to more effectively control the narrative. They can then depict anyone who resists them as terroristic riff-raff and further justify their mobilization as the clean-cut purifiers of society who must obviously be correct because they have the blessings, or at least the intentional ignorance, of the state and its blade. Increasingly, in the U.S., political parties are turning to traditionalist militia groups for protection in a sharply foreboding homage to history. Once they have paramilitary and physical power they can further diverge ideology from action and control the narrative so they no longer have to abide even by their own stated values. They can dive ever deeper into left-right crossover mythos and rally people at ever expanding levels. Once they have that, they can buy whatever political power they need because they have people and military strength. The government becomes unsure who its own army would side with. This is how coups happen.

If someone was going around saying that whites are the inferior race and should be ‘physically removed so to speak’ (that’s Hoppean-Pepe for ‘murdered’), white people (not a real identity group though) would then need to address how much of a viable threat this person is (how much power do they have or could they get?) and then act accordingly and proportionately in order to protect their lives. Even if speech acts are fundamentally different than physical violence, no one would be so ignorant as to say the general ordering the drone strike is not somehow culpable for the deaths that occur. One of the most famous examples of this of course is the trial of Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat responsible for facilitating the movement of Jews and minorities into the death camps. Hitler may never have pulled the trigger against a Jew, but he is undoubtedly the most directly responsible individual for the Holocaust. So this leaves us to question, what is the relationship between speech and violence and at what point can we mark the initiation of aggression?

This answer is contextual and the ethical lines are complex, however, the historical record does show that normal speeches were used to mobilize paramilitary attacks on civilians. Certain lesser known firebrands fomented pogroms of foreign day-laborers and Romani through impassioned and emotionally manipulative speeches. These white people killed a bunch of innocent people when they got triggered. This is of course proportional relative to the reach of the speaker however, the pedophilia advocating Milo Yiannopoulos, was planning on using his platform at UC Berkeley (which was controversially thwarted by broad-base antifa efforts) to encourage violence against undocumented persons including helping to have them sent to detention centers and deported (ie. kidnapped by domestic terrorists) in part by publicly naming undocumented individuals (a tactic known as doxxing). He had also in the past doxxed a transgender student in a vitriolic tirade in his talks, using his platform to encourage violence against her. Richard Spencer has a largely supportive audience in both 8chan (a doxxing Mecca) and Stormfront (associated with 100 known hate-crime murders), allowing him to direct violence while keeping his hands clean like many a fascist neo-nazi creep before him. Anyone who agrees with him should take note of the way he is more than happy to sacrifice his legions to protect himself like many a fascist neo-nazi or old-school U.S., slave owning, Southern elite before him. This is similar to the way that Henry Regnery utilizes Spencer as a whipping-post and how the front line in battles fought to maintain white power are often poor whites afraid of losing their seat.

Prior to WWII, the KPD saw the Nazis as being better than control by the Social Democrats who, by then had already killed Rosa Luxemburg amongst countless others in the communist and anarchist left so they softened their stance on fascism and assumed that people would come to their senses and they could seize power in the meantime. By the time the KPD realized what was happening with Hitler and began to rescind their allegiances and form AFA (Anti-Fascist Action) it was already too little too late. And it wasn’t militant diversity of tactics from the left that caused the rise of the nazis. It was instead, strong allegiances from the left and the right coupled with normalization through debate and ‘strategic’ partnerships. By then the nazis already had enough power to purge literally anyone they wanted, not just the anarchists and the commies (and of course the Jews et al.) but also the SA (the Night of Long Knives) and frame it all as a state of emergency and use it further project their strength and recruit and justify exponential violence.

The nazis won on the night when Hitler gave that first speech to the “patriot movement” in a crowded beer hall in Munich in 1923 and ordered a putsch to seize Bavaria. The “Beer Hall Putsch” did not succeed and Hitler was sent to jail where he was given a light sentence and was allowed to have Mein Kampf transcribed. During his speech he had to have a general in the room. He had to worm around and be smarmy with his Anti-Semitism, catering to audiences and taking risks before that crucial moment. Had people tried to wait for him to give an explicit military command, they would have been far outnumbered, outgunned, and out-trained by the time he said the magic words. Because, the moment when implicitly violent speech acts turns to explicit military commands, is but the time it takes for the sentence to form and by then you’ve already lost.

. We can debate the varied nuances of what we should do in these situations but suffice to say for now that free speech, while incredibly important, should not be allowed to be abused by people utilizing it for personal or violent aims. Free speech rights exist in tandem with the natural rights not to be the target of un-initiated violence. For speakers who utilize speech to repress or violate others, it is unquestionably within our rights to refuse them a p

latform. The question of violence is relative to the actionable threat. Free speech is essential in undermining genocide, but it is often utilized as a wedge to justify the inclusion of genocide advocating speakers amongst the rest of us who aren’t gross.

This is not a condemnation of non-violent or liberal antifascist strategies. We need all kinds. The one-two punch is important. But to assume that the speech acts of medium to high level proto-fascists are not directly linked to violence is an abuse to the historical record. We definitely need people constantly voicing the moral high ground and holding us accountable for our excesses but also we need to be realistic about stopping looming threats. Whether or not a given fascists book gets popularized after a resistance push is secondary in a sense to the meaningful resistance capable of challenging their threats to power and striking while that power projection is still fragile to prevent it from solidifying. But this also isn’t a “pre-emptive” strike; it’s a response to evidence and the justifiable threat of violence even though it is crucial to not let these fine lines ratchet ever-outwards.

Part 3: WINNING THE FASCIST MEME WAR

Ontological Crises, Updating, and Rationality

In order to overcome, resist, and create alternatives to fascist memetics we can utilize the process of memetic updating through evidence. Yudkowsky describes evidence as being “an event that is entangled, by links of cause and effect, with whatever you want to know about.” That basically just means that your thoughts and beliefs are mirrored by reliable phenomena in your environment. Rationality is considered a process of aligning one’s map (ontology) to the territory (ground truth) through the creation or discovery of evidence. Beliefs supported by evidence should “pay rent” in observable phenomena and also be capable of being disproven. Yudkowsky also states that, “The larger the space of possibilities in which the hypothesis lies, or the more unlikely the hypothesis seems a priori compared to its neighbors, or the more confident you wish to be, the more evidence you need.” What this means is that the more reliable a given theory is considered to be, should be directly proportional to the amount and quality of the evidence in favor of it.

An ontological crisis is the “crisis an agent, human or not, goes through when its model – its ontology – of reality changes.” In simpler terms, this just means the feeling when you believe, especially very deeply, that some way of understanding that you hold is true, and are then confronted with compelling evidence against it (1, 2, 3, 4). An ontological crisis can create a sense of dying or extreme discomfort the more tightly wound one’s identity and core epistemology is with the discredited former belief. One of the side-effects of evidence is that, when one allows contradictory evidence to enter one’s consciousness, it can be nearly impossible to eradicate the doubt that it generates. As counter-evidence circulates in one’s subconscious, exponentially increasing quantities of confirmation-biased pseudo-evidence are required to maintain one’s ideological status quo. Information seeks freedom and freedom is its homeostasis. When faced with counter-evidence, one has the choice to integrate this new information or try to resist it ever-forth. In order to not fight the losing, entropy-riddled, battle of self-deception one can choose to update.

In Bayesian epistemologies, people or systems value probabilities supported by evidence as a method of increasing the accuracy of their maps. When confronted by new evidence we must update our probabilities accordingly ( P(A|B)=P(A)·pev(A,B) and P(B|A)=P(B)·pev(A,B) ). When the probabilities reach a tipping point we are forced to update our belief system entirely. This method is designed to reduce the pain of ontological crises while simultaneously opening ourselves to evaluating the quality of beliefs based on evidence rather than just feelings, allegiances, or utility. Bayesian updating is subtracting mutual evidence from uncertainty. To simplify all of this, when we encounter evidence, that challenges our prior beliefs and creates an ontological crises it can be solved by updating our beliefs. Bayesian epistemologies themselves are not a dogmatic or perfect approach to truth but are invaluable tools. This form of rationality is of course also not a sole replacement to empathy and ethics.

Rationality can be sorted generally into two categories: epistemological rationality — valuing truth for truth’s sake, and instrumental rationality — valuing ‘truth’ for the sake of utility (1, 2). Epistemological rationality is trying to figure out what is actually going on while instrumental rationality is trying to figure out things that help one achieve what they want. Fascism is inherently of the latter variety which makes it vulnerable to truth while simultaneously giving it the ability to camouflage itself as truth and offer cheap but addictive rewards as compensation.

Fascism, as being inherently rooted in anti-rationalism, is exceptionally vulnerable to this kind of systematic analysis even though, in modern discourse terms like “race realism” and “the red pill” are meant to denote access to some difficult to accept set of truths. They frame the movement as one of rationality but when faced with a deeper analysis much of the fundamental underpinnings crumble. However, like any strong memetic virus, truths are mixed with lies or are strategically decontextualized for instrumental purposes so the process of weeding through the junk can be extremely cumbersome. For example, the fascist right often invokes African-American disproportionate use of welfare as evidence of their “laziness” while simultaneously decontextualizing the circumstances which could invoke that fact such as the evidenced existence of structural racism. In this example you can see that the deployment of this “fact” without its context serves an instrumental purpose in spreading anti-blackness but is vulnerable to the truths in context. Many people on the broader left (and of course the right as well) don’t have a very cohesive intellectual or moral epistemology so when confronted with literally anything outside of there memeplex it invokes a sort of crisis of identity.  Tolerance comes from having actually thought through and solved some of the contradictions in one’s own worldview. This allows us to be less afraid of memetic viruses, including those that are more dangerous than innocuous. Curiosity, the peak virtue of epistemological rationality, is in many senses, the antidote to fascist memetic hazards. In addition to the ability to intellectually process fascist memetic viruses though, they can also just be extremely emotionally draining and depressing which they rely on in overcoming potential attackers will-to-truth. Coupled with curiosity then, is a recognition of our structurally limited rational and emotional abilities and the need for supportive and collaborative care.

Building a Tolerance and Resisting

Of the class of memes that produce net beneficial results, there is something known as a “resistance meme” which is described as follows:

Many memes are self-immunizing – having seen it once leads to recognizing it and not re-transmitting it. It may be that a policy of free speech and rapidly mixing pattern of conversation gives better results than trying to quarantine memes. Still, some memetic diseases keep catching us despite having been caught before. How can we create and spread resistance to memetic diseases? Some memes ‘work’ (that is, propagate themselves) only if they’re implicit – knowing an explicit analysis of how the meme functions in an unwitting host is sufficient to defeat it. This knowledge, if it’s transmissible, is a resistance meme.

This means that memes, both beneficial and deleterious, have different contingencies that enable their spread or quarantine. For some memes such as the “God” meme, you have to believe in the meme in order for it to work properly which can often be disrupted by the introduction of doubt or skepticism. However, other memes are truth resistant in that they can meet a new truth head-on, without being subsumed by it (like rationality). The idea that for some memes we need increased free speech in order to break the implicit functionality of the meme while for others, free speech has been applied extensively and we have not been able to overcome the virus on that approach alone applies directly to fascist memetics in the sense that both conditions are true. We simultaneously need both exposure and quarantine, which provides perverse and contradictory incentives in the creation of resistance memes.

One of the biggest problems plaguing people’s memetic fragility is that we tend towards echo chambers, especially on the internet. Discomfort is….. uncomfortable, so we try to avoid it. Politically and ethically though, this means that people can only process gradual doses of intense ideology without getting bogged down in the details. When someone is coming at you full-speed with an entire paradigm, it can be hard to break it apart along individual claims and often little lies sneak by. In many situations, people need inoculation rather than immersion. However, inoculation against fascism has the double-edge of possibly promoting normalization so must be done carefully. With some dose of irony though, the alt-right and conservative approach of trying to trigger the left is actually helping to build the left’s tolerance in many areas.

Tolerance isn’t owned by scholarly intellectuals either. You don’t have to be a math wiz to understand that you should update when it seems that you’re wrong. The film “Welcome to Leith” showed average rural people effectively seeing through fascist doublespeak and resisting it on every level despite one admittedly not even knowing that white supremacy existed prior to encountering it. They greeted their ontological crises, updated, built a tolerance, and then resisted. This shows there are many paths to the one goal of proper handling.

The Meme War

Like it or not, this is the meme generation. We often communicate even IRL, with language derived from internet memes (“same”). Our thought processes are influenced by these deeply contextual, cultural capital cues and team signals. Memes often have layers of embedded meta level analysis although they aren’t nearly as good at subtlety as they are at making fun of “the other team.” But at the same time, a modern meme isn’t even usually funny unless it’s like at least two or three layers out. They gain their significance through connotation and exchange in social capital more than explicit statement. The alt-right has effectively utilized this through meta-irony and casual nihilism as a form of weaponized ‘cool’ and ‘edginess.’ Memes are a perfect channel for the shallow hits that fascism provides and are directly suited to their logic systems. Memes have further deepened the world of sloganeering which has enabled people on all sides to push catchy simplifications for better or for worse. One anonymous internet denizen remarked, “I’m just concerned that you’ll end up with a scenario like how libertarians aren’t capable of spotting a hyper-targeted, cronyist tax cut because of both the repetition of the “taxation is theft” meme (as in, internet meme) and the heavy opposition to taxes in conservative and libertarian circles. When I say “meme” above I don’t mean just the ones on meme pages. I also mean the broader definition that includes narratives which are effective at short-term results but which also result in a very superficial understanding that can be straight-up counterproductive.” Another contributor added, “My feeling was that in order for a meme to get greater than 3 levels of meta or of irony, it had to be nuanced. That feeling of ‘How did this thing that seems so intrinsically, terminally niche end up with 20,000 shares’ is either an actual sign of nuance or, well, dark arts at play.” In the meme war against the alt-right and emergent fascist creep, it is important to strategically weaponize propaganda, while at the same time subverting the dangerous pitfalls of this realm of deceit and power signalling. After all, the strength of anarchists has always been our ability to integrate complexity. Anarchism is a simple meme, with profoundly deep implications. Whereas fascism feigns depth and complexity but is instead a shallow pit of self-reflecting confirmation biases and smarmy realignments coupled with a strong power and righteousness signalling.

For many people, the alt-right is just a pit-stop for lolz and cheap strikes against easy targets on the left, but it is far too common for people to at some point lose sight of what part of them is wearing the mask of genocidal advocacy and white supremacy and which part has become a genuine advocate. Counter-recruitment is a must, as is misinformation, ethically engaged psy-ops, and genuine friendship. We cultivate something that they don’t: general empathy. We don’t need to virtue signal it because we can instead just share it through practice. A meme-queen remarked, “I mean we regularly have threads telling each other, sincerely, how much we like each other. We support each other in real ways, not the emotionally stunted, meme heavy ways of the fascists. When you can get that and get out of being told you’re scum…. that can be pretty powerful. The best part is it requires zero change in behavior on our part.” As cheesy as it sounds, love is anti-authoritarian and antifascist, as well as being one hell of a recruitment tool. Grounded, earnest wholesomeness and empathy can be strongly infectious memes especially when coupled with truth. Truth though, should intersect with ethics. For the fascist, their belief in race science justifies subversion. For the anarchist, any form of domination is a potential for liberation. For example, an adult anarchist doesn’t see cognitive differences between adults and children and think, “This justifies cruel subversion.” We think, “How can I contribute to the liberation of this mind? How is our liberation interdependent? What does agency and autonomy mean here?” This epistemic difference is crucial. For those fascists that we can pull, we should, for those that we cannot, we should destroy the viability of their ideas on the free market of ideas. This exceptional antifascist memestress also remarked, “We either change their minds or irritate the shit out of them. Both are successes.” We need to be more clever and funnier trolls, with better evidence, but also we need to be better friends. Fortunately, we have a lot going for us in all of these departments. On the individualized front, the memestress added, “It helps to never give them an inch, but also to not go overboard and look like a jackass.” It is also quite possible, and almost simple, to provoke fascists to reveal their actual values as a way to discredit them and spoil their entryism. For most, their fascist will-to-power is only a scratch beneath the surface, and if approached in just such a way, you can convince them to brag about their noxious desires and dreams. The revealing of this hidden dimension undermines their double-speak attempts and forces them to face their desires publicly.

Yet at the same time, we need to be pushing compelling counter-narratives and cooperative memetic strategies at the larger level. Anarchism is rich, but it isn’t self-explanatory to most people and many of our old adages (“Destroy bosses!”) have lost some of their power in modern parlance. We need to be creative. Many have found inspiration in the land of left-libertarianism as an approach to countering far-right capitalist appeals with the values of true liberty and market freedom coupled with a genuine care for people and non-violence. Others, such as the Redneck Revolt and John Brown Gun Club network, have made huge waves through careful labor radical media tactics coupled with rich imagery, a broad base of appeals, counter-recruitment, and clear shows of antifascist strength and readiness. These infiltrations have no doubt contributed to the III Percenter disavowal of alt-right white supremacist groups. We need all kinds. Propaganda and memetics in the meme war are certainly dark arts. We have to utilize them as both tools and weapons without losing sight of their dangers and ever ratcheting internal justifications. We can wear cleats on the slippery slopes. Defense against the dark arts often requires a careful wielding of the dark arts themselves.

This recent spate of nazis hiding, crying, dropping out of organizing along with their website and funding source shutdowns and other platform denials  is a direct result of antifascist direct action and countless hours of hidden labor. Through strategies like doxxing, nazis are being outed and losing their jobs left and right and describe the response as ‘terrifying.’ Antifa doesn’t need to win the media war (they won’t) but the recent wave of pro-anarchist/antifa articles and speeches from even pretty normie mainstream outlets and leaders is the result of them doing right as a result of massive pressure. Hell, Mitt mother-fucking Romney distinguished between nazis and antifascist protesters! Meanwhile your mainstream democrat friends on social media are sharing memes about ‘100 nahzee scalps’. Antifa groups were not originally designed for this type of long-term media crafting strategic landscape, but have been thrust into it. Certain figures such as Daryle Lamont Jenkins have emerged as de-facto antifa spokespeople to fill the need for a successful propaganda campaign that mitigates the obstacles antifa groups face in doing their practical and more immediate work.

This is, for sure, the strangest timeline but, the nazis got what they wanted. They drastically moved the Overton window but, what they didn’t intend is how much space that would open up for sympathetic views of the resistance movement against them. We’re in a time where antifascist recruitment in the U.S. is soaring and becoming normalized as people grapple with the real-life threats of fascist white terrorism. The danger is worse than it has been in a long-time but, to an extent, we are winning the meme war.

Beyond Freedom

Fascism is a potentially viral memetic disease, not because of its ‘repressed red-pill truths’ but rather for wholly the opposite reasons: it is a smarmy and mobile syncretism that can provide cheap rewards in a self-replicating will-to-power and does not depend on intellectual integrity. As a result, it has the capacity to cause great damage even despite it’s intrinsic failures to return on its promises of mythical resurgences of order, power, and purity. The solution is grounded empathy and rational approaches to ideological updating, coupled with a willingness to embrace and walk through ontological crises. Free speech, although an integral aspect of thriving society, is complexified by people’s structural inability to meaningfully sift through memetic viruses making it difficult to build collective immunities. As a result, it is important that we adopt the tactics of denial of platforms, freedom of disassociation, and physical resistance/self-defense, coupled with memetic innoculations through the larger meme war. Fascists don’t want free speech or the rationality they feign to worship. They want personal power and are willing to employ unconscionable violence to attain their impossible ends. They must be stopped, and a deeper understanding of how their memeplex functions allows us to be critical with regards to the efficacy of various of our tactics. In overcoming the fascist memetic landscape we will be able to push past vulgar non-cooperative game theoretic strategies, save countless lives, and build a more sustainable and free intellectual and emotional landscape for the future of society.

We would like to thank Megan Clapp, William Gillis, Allyn J., Meg Arnold, and Mike Gogulski who added thoughtful critique, inspiration, some verbatim writing, and needed edits. This was a strongly collaboratively developed piece.

On October 24 a judge dismissed the charges levied against several protesters who burned the American flag at the Republican National Convention last year. The protesters weren’t technically charged with burning the flag because that might constitute a violation of free speech. The protesters were charged with one of the state’s many items in its toolbox: disorderly conduct — as well as obstruction. The judge, however, noticed that this still seemed a bit like a violation of free speech, so the charges have gone away. Better late than never.

Meanwhile, a Louisiana parish has decided, contrary to Texas v. Johnson (1989) that flag burning is against the law. The state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) begs to differ, but they have been through this sort of case before. One recent, disturbing example was Pennsylvanian Joshua Brubaker who was arrested in 2014  after he wrote “AIM” (American Indian Movement) on an American flag and displayed it on his porch upon hearing that the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre was for sale. It’s appalling enough to have people arrested for protest that ostensibly could have endangered others, but to be arrested for displaying what amounts to a banner on your own property is another level. After the local ACLU sued on his behalf, Brubaker won a $55,000 settlement.

Local and state authorities continue to ignore Johnson and pass laws that attempt to punish flag burning and desecration. In the recent past federal politicians aiming to look good–including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton–have supported laws or even constitutional amendments that would criminalize what is clearly an act of speech.

Just because flag burning and desecration is legal doesn’t mean that local cops and politicians will treat it as such or that people won’t be outraged by it. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s initial knee protest against police brutality and racism in America was so minor, polite, and restrained. His reward is to be an unsigned NFL player and to have his protest taken out of his hands in a clumsy anti-Trump fever. Fair enough to the latter, nobody owns a protest or taking a knee during the anthem. Still, he’s gotten so much flak for something so quiet, so respectful, what chance do any of us have when we try to diminish the power of that symbol of statism? When we have bigger changes that we dream of than Kaepernick does, where do we begin?

The flag is powerful. It is transubstantiation, with an appalling lack of respect for metaphor or even property sometimes. Every veteran, see, fought for the flag. Every American flag is like the other, and each is imbibed with the United States. Not anything bad about it like militarism, or police brutality–problems big enough to make a person refuse to put their hand over their heart, or remove their hat–no, just the celluloid version of what could have been, but was never going to be, the fairytale.

This worship of the flag has real consequences. As the satirical Onion put it once, “U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.” Commitment to nationalism invariably means forgetting about the humans who live there, unless you’re valuing their lives one thousand to one over that of someone who lives somewhere else. A commitment to nationalism is taught in rituals such as pledging allegiance to the flag and standing in the proper, respectful fashion for the anthem. Subsequently, it would follow that if you wish you fight those messages, iconoclasm is the answer. Destroy those deified symbols that reinforce the collective notion of a state, and its superiority over individual human rights and freedoms.

Unfortunately, burning flags rarely imparts the subtlety and the depth that is needed to change minds. Sometimes you want to do it — like if you’re listening to Phil Ochs and thinking about the military industrial complex and you suddenly really want to desecrate a flag (uh, for example). You want to smash something sacred to the state because they went to war and they’re never going to stop. But for every burning flag that an anarchist might mean with love and with empathy for fellow humans, someone else–most anyone else–will read it as hateful, reactionary, and, in all likelihood, socialist or communist (in the most pejorative, unnuanced, most Soviet sense).

Ironically, the symbolism of burning a flag may not convince people. If you believe that this act represents spitting in the face of the best of the best geographical location in the world–scorning Americans who suffered in hellish war zones over the past two centuries–watching it will not change your mind. However, the number of people who actually believe that we should outlaw such an act makes doing it for its own sake important. According to a Cato Institute poll, seventy percent of Republicans believe in a law against flag desecration. Over fifty percent agree with President Trump’s bizarre spasm of an idea-tweet that burning a flag should void someone’s citizenship.

The same people who think flag desecration means more than the act of destroying an object are the same ones who need to see that it is merely speech, and they need face the fact that nothing terrible happens when you express your ideas this way.

Burning a flag is morally, and perhaps philosophically,like standing on a soap box and speaking, but it doesn’t impart complexities that the people with their ears and eyes stopped will be able to comprehend. The people who saw the RNC activists burning the flag and the nosey officials angry about Joshua Brubaker’s American Indian Movement flag couldn’t understand the message, or they refused to. They read it as an assault on all they held dear instead of an outcry against systems that crush human beings.

You can’t change nationalism through one grand, cathartic act, as much as it feels like you should be able to–blow up Mt. Rushmore, burn all the flags there aren’t black, rainbow, or purple and pink, and then we’ll all be free. It’s going to happen so much slower than that, so much more carefully, and with so many more words. It’s a slog, and it does mean speaking to people who think we’re desperately wrong and terribly naive (at best). Letting them rant and rave, and then telling them that that’s not so and it doesn’t need to be this way.We need not and should not respect the meaning of the flag. We should try to destroy that meaning, but as righteously tempting as it is to try to destroy it with fire or spray paint, it seems unlikely that the best of anarchism and anti-statism will ever come through that way.

Individualist anarchism is the most radical form of libertarianism, which is in turn a radical form of liberalism. From this perspective, the threat of fascism poses a unique challenge.

One reason for this is that fascism is individualist anarchism’s polar opposite, as far as one can go in a comprehensive rejection of liberalism. Fascism is not particularly concerned with principles, but to the extent it has any, they are direct inversions of liberal principles – that the world is fundamentally based in insoluble conflict, universal humanity is a myth, individualism is meaningless and soul-destroying, reason is impotent, violence is the motor that drives the world, so on and so forth.

A second reason is that, in practical political terms, fascism forces an apparent choice between abandoning liberalism or accepting defeat. It is this second problem which brings us together for this Mutual Exchange.

Much has rightly been made of the threat of entryism, where one movement attempts to seize the resources of another. This is something that we must combat. Yet fascism’s game involves not only subverting liberal movements directly, but also pushing those movements into positions where it seems they must discard their principles. As I will argue later, this is tactically crucial for the fascist, as it moves the conflict to terrain where they have a higher chance at success.

Here I will argue that the use of violence against fascist assembly falls into this trap, making it both ethically unacceptable and tactically inadvisable.

For reasons of focus, I will limit my argument in the following ways. I will assume that others in this exchange accept liberalism in at least its broadest form. This might look like an odd assumption, since many defenders of this tactic do not consider themselves liberals. In the present context though, this assumption is reasonable. This is first because I am writing primarily to individualist anarchists, and second because by “at least its broadest form,” I mean something very, very broad. By this I mean there is at minimum a strong presumption against the initiation of violence. Accepting this weak form of non-aggression need not mean accepting Rothbardian libertarianism, only that violence is typically only permissible in defense.

I will also assume that we are not talking about the use of political violence generally, but very specifically about violence against fascist assembly. “Fascist” here should be understood to include white supremacy,[1] but not more pedestrian forms of authoritarian nationalism like that found in the mainstream portion of Donald Trump’s support. “Fascist assembly” should be taken to mean politically-aimed activism taking place in public, not private conversations between a small group of people just standing around.

I use the term “violence against fascist assembly” in place of “no platform,” “de-platform,” “denying fascists a platform,” etc., because these terms are ambiguous between activities I support and those I oppose. I will not be arguing against the practice, for instance, of contacting someone with property rights over a platform (such as a hotel) which fascists intend to use to promote their views and getting them to exclude fascists from this property. I will be arguing against the practice of violently disrupting fascists from engaging in political assembly on public property, fascists’ own property, or property consensually granted to fascists.

I will further assume that the violence under discussion is not at all from, or in collaboration with, the state. All together, I will take for granted that everyone here agrees with a weak principle of non-aggression, rejects violence against more pedestrian right-wingers as ethically unacceptable and tactically asinine, does not support violence towards even fascists who are not engaged in political assembly, and agrees with the ACLU’s pre-Charlottesville free speech absolutism in terms of state laws. If any of these points are contested, we can carry those discussions further, but for now I will assume them to be true.

There are both ethical and tactical reasons for opposing violence against fascist assembly. These are deeply intertwined, and I ask skeptical readers to consider them first independently and then in conjunction.

The ethical argument for rejecting violence against fascist assembly is straightforward: violence is typically unacceptable unless it is used in defense, and this means violence against fascist assembly is presumptively unacceptable. A first set of replies to this argument claim that, in proper context, violence against fascist assembly is actually defensive. A second set of replies says that even if this violence is aggressive, fascism’s unique threat confronts us with an exceptional case. After responding to these points, I will move on to tactical considerations. Afterward, I will give some closing thoughts on the use of violence for expressive purposes.

Defense Arguments I: Fascist Policy

The first set of arguments in defense of violence against fascist assembly hold that, in proper context, it is not even aggressive. This should not be rejected out of hand. While speech cannot itself be violence, it can play a constitutive role in various violent acts – such as through the orders of a general, the directions given to a hitman, or a threat used to coerce compliance without going through with the violence threatened.

One way I have seen it argued that violence against fascist assembly is defensive, is through the suggestion that fascism necessarily involves massive state violence, and therefore political assembly towards that end is necessarily a threat. On the assumption that forcibly breaking up this assembly will make that violence less likely – which I will question later on – this violence is therefore defensive.

In response, it should first be readily conceded that fascism necessarily requires massive state violence. One cannot create the racial autarky Richard Spencer seeks without brutality from state agents, and he knows this. Those who argue for a 100% white United States, as he does, give as their goal the forced removal and restricted movement of non-whites, and state their intentions to act as necessary towards that goal. It is therefore entirely true that fascist assembly, and in fact all fascist political speech of any kind, is a threat of violence.

This is also true of all political activism of any kind that is inconsistent with anarchist libertarianism.[2] There are countless obvious differences in both degree and kind between the intentions of Identity Evropa and College Democrats, but both sincerely seek to impose their goals through aggressive violence. Unless we want to authorize violent disruptions of the latter, the mere fact that the former’s assembly constitutes a threat in this particular sense cannot be enough to make violence against that assembly defensive.

There are also good reasons not to bite that bullet beyond its being a bullet. It is true that the violent disruption of speech acts partly constitutive of acts of violence are really disrupting that violence, and therefore defensive. It is also true that all political speech inconsistent with anarchist libertarianism is a threat. However, this political speech, despite being a threat, does not play a constitutive role in the violence it threatens. For example, back when I wrote for a college newspaper, one of my fellow columnists argued that the Obama administration should wage a full-scale invasion of Syria against Assad. This would have involved massive aggression against individual Syrians and their property, so in a certain sense this column constituted a threat. That threat would play no constitutive role in that aggression, though, so violently preventing his column from publication would not have been defensive.

Defense Arguments II: Fascist Street Violence

A second argument for violence against fascist assembly being defensive does not reference fascists’ public policy goals, but instead to the more immediate threat of street violence. In other words, the violence defended against here would not be the violence of a future fascist state, it would be against direct aggression from the assembled fascists against minorities.

This is not paranoia. While it is dangerous to base our understanding of the world on publicly salient cases, Jeremy Christian’s stabbings and the vehicular homicide of Heather Heyer still happened. Those publicly identifying with fascism signal allegiance to the same ideology behind those crimes. That ideology bottoms out in a lethal conflict between Friend and Enemy, so it is unsurprising when it results in murder. Fully appreciating this point is sometimes difficult for white, straight and cisgender men like myself who do not wear an inescapable mark of Enemy for fascists.

I think these are reasons to, as I will say more about later, make clear a readiness for the competent use of defensive violence when fascists assemble. That being said, it cannot be taken from the mere fact that fascists are assembled as fascists that they will engage in street violence. It is simply a fact that fascists have politically assembled several times without engaging in violence. While the connection between fascist assembly and fascist violence is very present, it is not clean enough to reason from “fascists are assembling as fascists” to “fascists are about to violently attack.”

Furthermore, even for movements much more open and honest about their aggression, not all are direct participants in that violence. Despite many things unique to fascism, there is no reason to assume it is uniquely uniformly made up of people competently prepared to engage in violence. We cannot, then, strike at just any given fascist due to what other fascists might do.

Defense Arguments III: Intimidation

Earlier, when mentioning ways that speech might be constitutive of violence, one example was “a threat used to coerce compliance without going through the violence threatened.” This relates to a third argument for the claim that violence against fascist assembly is defensive. When fascists assemble, this is intended to cause intimidation, especially from racial, religious, sexual and gender minorities. Even if no violence actually comes, a ripple of fear still helps bolster straight white cisgender male dominance. Violence against fascist assembly breaks up this act of intimidation, and this argument concludes that violence is therefore defensive.

It is first important to notice that the argument cannot just be that fascist assembly affects others’ behavior. One aim (realistic or not) of almost all political assembly is to affect others’ behavior. A successful instance of this from a more normal act of political assembly is of course not in any way aggressive, since that change does not come from a threat of violence. Therefore, if this argument succeeds, it is because the intended effect on others’ behavior from fascist assembly results from a threat of violence.

With this in view, we can see that this third argument is actually dependent on either the first or second working. This is because the threat of violence used to coerce compliance must either be a threat of future fascist policy or street violence. Therefore, this argument cannot succeed if both the previous ones fail.

This might seem too quick. One way the intimidation factor might make this third argument succeed where the others failed is because an assembly’s use of intimidation to effect behavioral change connects their assembly more closely to the potential future violence. In reply, while this does create a close connection of sorts between their assembly and the potential future violence, it does not make their assembly play a constitutive role in the violence itself. Their collective speech is still distinct from its related acts of potential violence in a way that “put the money in the bag” is not distinct from its related acts of potential violence.

Here – as in my discussion of the last two arguments – my replies may seem to treat fascist violence too lightly. I therefore ask the reader to remember my request that they first consider the ethical and tactical sections of this post independently and then in conjunction. My intent is not to flippantly sacrifice people’s lives because of technicalities in the natural law.

There are many other arguments for saying that violence against fascist assembly is contextually defensive. If our discussion carries us there, I will outline my reasons for rejecting those as well. Seeing as this post is already long, and I’d like to give sufficient space for tactical considerations, I will move on to the next category of argument.

Exceptional Case Arguments

There are also arguments which both, accept a weak non-aggression principle and agree that violence against fascist assembly is non-defensive, yet still support violence against fascist assembly. These hold, in different ways, that while aggression is ordinarily impermissible, fascism presents us with an exception. Without physical force, fascism will come to power, and the aggressive violence that will occur both on its way to power and after that power is acquired will be so world-historically horrific that aggression is justified.

There are three ways one might argue against these claims. First, the weak non-aggression principle could be traded for a stronger one with no exceptions. Second, that fascism presents an exceptional case could be denied by denying fascism entails world-historically horrific injustices. Third, that the threat of fascism presents an exceptional case could be denied by denying the tactical necessity of aggressive violence in dealing with fascism. It is this third response that I will be taking.

I will not take the first line, because while I personally think something more robust than weak non-aggression is true, I do not think it is plausible that there are literally zero cases where apparent aggression is justified. This would also practically amount to a concession, given the terms I set out at the beginning, and would lead us to more complicated (and I think less productive) debates about non-aggression itself. I will not take the second line, because I think it is probably false. There have been many fascist regimes, some admittedly much further from world-historically horrific in their consequences than others, but that is not the sort of thing to gamble about. Also, the rhetoric coming from the Alt-Right in particular is so romantically bold in its racism that it seems closer to the world-historically horrific side of things.

Rejecting the claim that fascism presents an exceptional case because aggressive violence is not tactically necessary for dealing with it obviously relies heavily on tactical questions. I will therefore go ahead and move on to those tactical questions. Before doing so, though, I want to note some general concerns with exceptional case arguments.

Regardless of whatever else we think about non-aggression and its exceptions, it is clear that exceptional case narratives are at least considerably more common than actual exceptional cases. Virtually everyone agrees that violence is generally acceptable only in defense, and virtually no one wants to admit that their violence is unjust. In terms of state violence, the whole project of political authority is an argument for a state of exception to individual-to-individual norms surrounding violence. Once the limits of that authority are agreed upon, they widen through appeals to emergency that cease to become appeals to emergency. This phenomenon has been widely discussed by radical scholars ranging from Giorgio Agamben to Robert Higgs.

Exceptional case narratives are clearly more dangerous in advancing state policy, given that the violence of this policy will then break down the rule of law as it gets regularized through a massive institution of criminal violence. Yet exceptional case narratives are still dangerous in the breakdown of social norms. Upholding good norms is the entire point, for example, behind not wanting to normalize fascist rhetoric and ideas. That the proposed exceptional case here is for a general readiness to use aggressive violence against fascist assembly, not a particular isolated act, makes it especially prone to break down our norms against political violence.

It is often noted in reply to this concern that political violence is already normalized, with appeal to the state’s aggression. This is of course true. It misses the point though, which is that political violence by non-state actors is not presently normalized, and normalizing it would expand the scope of aggression beyond where it is now. That we should further seek to delegitimize the state’s aggression is not a reason to treat this increased scope lightly.

In conversations about antifa, it is regularly argued that they tend to be pretty careful about targeting fascists and only fascists. I will not dispute this here; it seems to be generally true, and the vast majority of alleged counterexamples have turned out to be fraudulent. What is more important, though, is that antifa are not the only actors in society, and others have not shown themselves to be so careful. Moreover, as Ken White has noted elsewhere, the breakdown of this norm will further embolden right-wing goons looking to excuse their own aggression.

Given these concerns, the bar – both in seriousness of considerations and certainty – for arguments claiming exceptions to non-aggression is very high. We must know beyond a reasonable doubt that the consequences it avoids are catastrophic, and that there is no realistic alternative. In the next section, I will argue that we not only do not have that level of certainty in there being no realistic alternative, we have good reason to believe violence against fascist assembly is counterproductive. We are not merely unjustified in committing violence against fascist assembly because it is not crucial that we engage in it, we are unjustified in committing it in part because of the consequences themselves. It is crucial that we resist the impulse towards this tactic, because it will weaken our resistance and embolden fascist advancement.

Tactical Considerations

As a general note, people tend to wildly overestimate the political benefits of violence, and discussions often proceed as if the only possible objections would be on moral grounds.[3] Work by theorists of political strategy like Gene Sharp and Erica Chenoweth shows that this assumption is mistaken. However, that work is also typically focused on resistance to states and state power, not rising fringe groups engaged in street violence and seeking power. Violence against fascist assembly is not directed against the social order itself, it is locally applied to a specific exceptional threat to that social order. I am therefore much less confident in the inefficacy of violence against fascist assembly than I am in the inefficacy of insurrectionary strategies against the state. Even so, I am still pretty sure about the inefficacy of violence against fascist assembly.

Before I explain why, I first want to say something about antifa. It is difficult to speak concretely about a loose-knit movement like them, especially when some of their defenders attempt to conflate them with anti-fascists more generally (though not with those who behave irresponsibly). All the same, it is easy to discuss them more capably than much of the established press. For instance, a particularly egregious article by Megan McArdle is almost proudly ignorant, characterizing antifa as progressives[4] and nonchalantly saying that she only “began to notice them around the time of Trump’s election.” This proud ignorance then leads her to say of antifa that “[t]he only things they can stop, and the police cannot, are things that aren’t crimes: notably, people exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and speak their minds.”

Violence against fascist assembly is only antifa’s most publicly visible activity, and I am consistently told that it makes up only a very small portion of what they do. In addition to that, they engage in activities like researching fascist organizations and exposing them, which protects our recently damaged norms against fascism. Another service antifa provides is in alerting unknowing venues that their property is being used to advance fascism. This is the good kind of “no-platforming” that I mentioned earlier.[5] Similarly, they alert social scenes and movements against the threat of entryism. In Minnesota, antifa activists worked constructively with Trump supporters to prevent fascists from deceptively participating in the Trump supporters’ rally. In fairness to McArdle, it’s true that these are not necessarily cases of antifa stopping crimes. Nonetheless, they are extremely valuable, and these services will not be provided by the police.

Another role is violent. Fascists are typically opportunistic, often looking for the earliest excuse to engage in violence. It is therefore important to be visibly ready to physically defend people fascists attempt to attack.[6] In addition to defending against fascist violence, antifa and others help document that violence when it occurs. These are things that, on paper, the police are tasked with doing – but Charlottesville and other incidents show us that strict reliance on them is suicidal. This lesson is of course unsurprising for anarchists.

With all this in mind, a major problem with the acceptance of violence against fascist assembly is that this is not just one tactical choice among others. When it matters – as in, times like now and times that might grow out of times like now – the decision to accept violence against fascist assembly comprehensively restructures all other strategic choices. A commitment to aggressive violence as a regular tool is a commitment to aggressive violence being the primary tool, as it weakens all others.

Once it is known that you openly intend to strike first, many people not already on your side will see you as just another pack of goons. They will therefore be less likely to take you seriously when you tell them a group is fascist – “Oh, they’re just looking for a fight; they call everyone fascist.” You will also now have reason for hostility towards journalists, and that hostility will feed negative public perception. Even your defensive violence will be easily painted as aggressive, since you’ve made clear you have no real problem with aggression.

Much of this is about controlling the narrative, because controlling the narrative is ultimately the whole point. The fascist threat is not just a bunch of violent acts by fascists, and it is certainly not the mere idea of them standing around quoting Evola. The threat is fascism becoming just another idea, let alone one with a serious chance at power. This is not Weimar Germany, but it is also not 2007. Donald Trump is President, Richard Spencer gets interviews with NPR and Charles Barkley, and Europe is seeing much of the same.

Many of these aggression-friendly strategies focus on winning immediate battles without an eye to the war. Obviously, violently shutting down a rally can stop that rally from taking place. It can even scare fascists away from holding similar rallies for the near future.[7] Yet I fear that these facts can trick us into the mindset of old religious authorities, who thought they could contain heresy by burning books that voice it. They overlooked the printing press; perhaps we overlook the internet. In that digital world, a violent clash in the physical one can give them narrative tools to fester faster. Civilization is under attack; the war is already here, time to pick a side. The real threat of violence for your views of course also helps to strengthen group solidarity.

Even beyond inadvertently pushing their narratives, these actions can push conversations to territory where fascists can more easily succeed. Noam Chomsky has been severely maligned by antifa’s defenders for his recent claim that they are “a major gift to the Right… [because w]hen confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is.” One response has been to note that there are plenty of times when anti-fascist brawlers have defeated fascists in street war. While this shows Chomsky’s point is not a necessary truth, it does not reduce the claim to nonsense. Fascists are often unscrupulous, familiar with violence, and looking for a fight as an end in itself. Comparatively, given the tools at fascism’s disposal, I am very confident that it is more likely to win through a physical confrontation than an intellectual one.

Of course, intellectual confrontations with fascists are not as simple as the best ideas automatically winning through the pure light of reason. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, fascists do not engage in good faith. They deliberately misrepresent both your ideas and theirs, having mastered subrational forms of communication to silence reason and amplify prejudice. These conversations can look like a normal debate to unsuspecting onlookers, who can mistake the fascist’s sophistry for bold truth-telling and find themselves infected.[8]

In their more honest moments, fascists’ own words will tell you this. Richard Spencer exclaims in a speech to his National Policy Institute that “will and imagination are far more powerful than the truth.” Fascist podcaster Mike Enoch casually mocks the “autism” of libertarians, with the substantive point behind his ableism being that following ideas to their logical conclusions is silly. At a certain level, even fascists know that their ideas are nonsensical.

These considerations lead many anti-fascists to opt against intellectual confrontation for physical confrontation. This has things backwards. It is precisely because of this element in fascists’ strategy that we should resist the temptations of aggression. It is to their advantage to provoke violence and escalate chaos. It is out of that chaos that people don’t know what to think, find themselves consulting prejudice, and welcome the firm language of fascism.[9]

This tornadic cultural climate not only gives fascists necessary cover to run towards power; it gives the authoritarian nationalists already in power a chance to play savior. Fascists disguise themselves as typical Trump supporters in hopes the media will cover it that way after a rumble. Those same fascists send fake threats to parades and conservative college tours. Groups who fall victim to these hoaxes cannot say they disavow all violence against assembly, only that these threats were not theirs. Both the center left and center right start to sympathize with claims that antifa is a “gang” and should be legally classified as such. Trump and Sessions are given ample evidence of politically-motivated civil strife, and formerly apathetic Americans hear a strange calling in the words “law and order.”

None of this means the political repression of antifa is their own fault, nor does it mean that we should treat fascists, the Trump administration, or ordinary Americans as blameless. Assigning blame is not the point here, the point is to assess the pros and cons of violence against fascist assembly. With all this in mind, we find ourselves in the opposite of a legitimate state of exception where aggression is justified. We are at a point where the costs of aggression are even higher than normal, potentially breaking down established norms against political violence, weakening other tools at our disposal, and further clouding reason for fascist benefit.

Some Notes Toward Better Strategy

Criticizing is always easier than offering alternatives. I am not a master of political strategy, so I will not pretend to have some grand blueprint for defeating the Alt-Right. Instead, I will give some general notes. Fascists cannot survive in liberalism, so their first step is always the disruption of liberalism. Their goals are in pushing things away from sincere debate and into sophistry and violence. This can’t be too obvious, so they try to mask every attempt at subverting rational discourse as engagements in it. Their attacks on liberalism are almost always parasitic on it, gleefully saying their enemies smashed up a “free speech” rally, or balking at “triggered” interlocutors who supposedly can’t handle reasonable conversation. Their apparent arguments are often red herrings, so critiquing them on their own terms is fruitless.

A problem then is that direct engagement falls into one trap, whereas moving the conflict to the subrational – violent or not – can help create their storm clouds of confusion. Stepping back, we should remember that the goal is capturing the narrative and rebuilding norms against fascism. There are several methods for doing this despite fascist deception, each appropriate for different cases.

For example, just as violence can be used to terminate violence and restore cooperation, subrational communication can be used to terminate subrational communication and restore reason. Liberals (typically liberal progressives) are often mocked for “fighting Nazis with penetrating satire.” The attitude mocked there deserves mockery, but it is not because satire is impotent against fascism. It is because that mockery is often useless mockery, only for the entertainment of other progressives. This is the kind of mockery easily turned back on the comedian, like ever-nauseating jokes about “Drumpf.” Mockery can also fan the flames of fascist fires to discourse when it implies no rational conclusions. Successful mockery, then, must first be on terms that even the mocked (and those susceptible to the mocked’s claims) will understand, and second, force the fight back into the ring of reason.

A related strategy can be called that of ‘belligerent rationality.’ Belligerent rationality, in this context, forces a particular point of contention and subjects it to extreme scrutiny without letting up. Ideally, this is something the fascist assumes more implicitly than explicitly, mentioned only quickly if it all. These are the points where the fascist’s case is weakest, yet also on which it most depends. I frankly do not think, for example, that many on the Alt-Right even care that much about whether or not race is biologically real. Plenty of them also do not seriously care as much as they seem to about the nature of relationships between race and crime or race and intelligence. Richard Spencer will say this openly. It is really just the fact that they are sociologically white, and race is the kind of grouping where people’s prejudices and ingroup tendencies can find fullest expression. Accordingly, pressing questions like why one should actually care about race, rather than other features of identity reveals the baselessness of the fascist’s position.

Narrative control will also involve shows of rejection. One argument for violence against fascist assembly points out that fascist rallies function as a show of force, attaching a sense of power to their movements. This much seems true. For that reason, massive public counterprotests – like the one against a fascist-friendly rally in Boston soon after Charlottesville – can turn those shows of force on their head.[10] Norms of overwhelming, unanimous social rejection towards fascism can be further mended by getting other movements and social scenes to combat entryism. The cooperative anti-fascist efforts between antifa and Republican activists in Minnesota mentioned earlier are a shining example of this.

Fascist shows of force can also be beaten back by those antifa methods I praised previously. Research and exposure, the documentation of fascist aggression, and a clear readiness for competent defense geared towards de-escalation are all invaluable in fighting fascism.

All these tactics must be practiced with serious care. Do not argue with fascists unless you’re skilled at cutting through sophistry; do not go to rallies armed unless you thoroughly trust your judgment in relevant situations and know how to properly use that weapon. You must know what you’re getting into, and where your talents place your comparative advantage in the anti-fascist division of labor.

Conclusion: Note on Expressive Violence

Finally, I want to close with some thoughts about expressive violence. This is violence with no further tactical aim at all, just violence with an aim of violence. It is the catharsis of forcefully rejecting an enemy through physical force. I do not bring this up to strawman anyone else in this exchange; I assume that we agree on the injustice of expressive violence. I bring it up because I have on multiple occasions been told by others that even if violence towards a fascist achieves nothing else, it at least gives a feeling of relief to the assailant and others. This is honestly understandable.

While I do not support the January 20^th punching of Richard Spencer, it would be a lie to say that I did not enjoy the memes or even laugh at the original video. Everything about his behavior immediately preceding the blow exemplifies the phrase “punchable.” From his snide “sure” to “Do you love black people?” – somehow worse than if he just said “no” – to giddily recalling fascist appropriations of Pepe, it looked like a skit with a perfectly timed punchline. Memes of the incident probably also functioned as successful mockery, saying in effect, “No, you’re not a revolutionary, you’re the kind of pseudointellectual nuisance who tries to unironically wax philosophical about 4chan memes.”

As a middle-class, middle-American (yet southern), cisgender white man, I cannot pretend to imagine how  it might have been for those in other social locations – and I do not intend to shame anyone for their reactions.

We must resist the pull of expressive violence all the same, if for no reason other than its tactical damage in our fight against fascism. The prospects of a fascist future are deadly serious, and the thrills of violence are not worth that risk.

We must also resist the pull of expressive violence because its social acceptance is at the root of state power. The principle that wrongdoing must be condemned with violence maintains incarceration and execution, through appeal to the expressive function of punishment. It pushes Brady Bills and Patriot Acts, with the idea that something must be done following tragedies, and that this something must be an increase of state violence. It says that those who resist gun control after spree shootings and those who defend civil liberties after terror attacks don’t really care about innocent victims.

It further says that those who reject aggression against fascists do not take seriously the threat of fascism.

We must take seriously the threat of fascism. We must recognize that it represents a comprehensive rejection of liberalism, and stave off entryism by regularly rejecting fascism in full.

For the fascist, lethal conflicts of Friend and Enemy give us our sense of meaning, and make us feel alive. To reject fascism in full means a rejection of this as well.

The threat of fascism cannot be overcome by accepting its terms and moving to its preferred terrain. It can only be overcome by holding our ground.

I am asking that we hold our ground.

Endnotes

[1] “White supremacy” here refers to movements whose race-centric pro-domination values are more explicit, like white nationalism, not the subtler structures of institutional racism. This is not because I reject this other usage, but because I’m specifically discussing this more overt, ideological movement. I include “white nationalism” under this kind of “white supremacy,” because white nationalists clearly want whites to reign supreme in their proposed ethnostate. There are obvious issues with using “fascist” and “white supremacist” interchangeably in this way, not all of which are pedantic. Despite that, I will use “fascist” as a catch-all because it is short and accords with public discourse on the topic.

[2] Here, to be “consistent with anarchist libertarianism” is meant in a very thin sense, as in, “does not require a state or any other violations of non-aggression.”

[3] Admittedly, I may have contributed to this perception here by first going through the ethical problems with violence against fascist assembly before talking about the tactical ones. My comments on tactical considerations should not be seen as an afterthought – if anything, it is more important than the sections preceding it.

[4] She actually says “liberal,” but it is clear in context that she means “liberal progressive.”

[5] In addition to our rights of free speech, which these tactics clearly do not violate, there is also an important value of free speech, which goes over and above what we owe to others as a matter of right. This means there are reasonable grounds for wondering about these tactics as well, especially in certain cases. While I think these tactics should be used carefully, I do not think that free speech even in the non-rights-centric sense, cuts against these them. Since our exchange is on anti-fascism and free speech, I may write something separate on this point later.

[6] In addition to antifa, armed groups like Redneck Revolt have helped here.

[7] For instance, see the cancelled “anticom” rally in Charlotte. A discussion of the way fascists abuse anti-communism is of course worthy of its own post.

[8] The YouTube commentator ContraPoints has two excellent videos on this topic. The first dramatizes the phenomenon in the form of a short play, and the second is a guide to the Alt-Right’s main methods of deception. Incidentally, she has also explored the general subject of this Mutual Exchange in the form of a dialogue.

[9] It is also out of this chaos that the most grotesquely authoritarian forms of Communism become appealing to leftists.

[10] This also helps to cut against the intimidation effects discussed previously.

Anarchists have always paid a lot of attention to feedback loops. Seemingly small actions, small arrangements, small evils tolerated, can rapidly or inexorably build up to systematic and seemingly omnipotent power relations. Things that, in isolation don’t seem that bad, can lead to the formation of states or make those states even more authoritarian. Certain economic arrangements can lead to wealth progressively concentrating power into the hands of a few. As anarchists we are always laser focused on the the dangers of letting anyone get a monopoly in anything. On the dangers of even the tiniest interpersonal acts of domination. And as radicals we never settle for established conventions, we’re always questioning where what is considered “common sense” breaks down. We are always searching for the boundary conditions beyond which a rule of thumb is no longer useful. In what contexts do some dangers overwhelm other dangers?

The ideal of free speech — or as I think it should be better parsed, freedom of information — is an ideal of incredible importance that extends well beyond merely opposing state censorship. It’s deeply worrying to see that value erode with the rhetorical ratchet of online conflict. However, freedom of speech is not as clear-cut of an ideal as some think; its application or pursuit is unavoidably tangled, as its most studied champions admit. A world of vibrant open communication where the most accurate ideas rise to the top is a goal — not something that can be achieved by codifying a few simplistic rules of action.

We can all agree that cutting the telegraph wires of fascist generals coordinating an invasion would violate their personal “free speech” but it is also an action clearly justified insofar as it saves the free speech of the millions they plan to subjugate. To truly defend free speech on the whole we must sometimes deny it to its murderous enemies. To defend the ideal of a richly interconnected world where information flows freely takes more than speech, it requires action against those brutally organizing against it.

It is precisely my openness to contrary or extreme ideas, my diligence in listening to all parties, that has led me to realize complexities to free speech. In particular to recognize very extreme situations where the danger of backsliding on broadly tolerant social norms is outweighed by the danger of those ideologically committed to domination and whose recruitment proceeds not through reason but shows of force. There are always exceptions to otherwise good strategies and heuristics — as anarchists we do not rely upon the state or its obtuse and dangerous legal system and thus it is our duty as individuals to not hide from such complications. It is our responsibility as individuals to sometimes judge and act in ways that we would never trust any monopolistic institution to judge or act. Although, of course we must be careful and vigilant nonetheless.

While I inevitably have some disagreements with some among the vast and diverse array of activists who work as antifascists, I value the work that antifa groups and organizations have long undertaken to safeguard our world from the worst possible horrors. When in my neighborhood a decade ago swastikas were going up, businesses owned by people of color were being attacked, and neonazis were brutally jumping people, I certainly wasn’t going to go to the police. I’m an anarchist and consistent in my opposition to the authoritarianism of the police state. But also Portland’s Police — like many other departments — are themselves infested with white nationalists and broadly sympathetic to such scum. Instead I forwarded descriptions to some community members who’d gotten fed up and formed an antifa group and were actively researching and exposing these neonazis. Their work as journalists and as activists to organize boycotts and physically resist attacks helped save my neighborhood and I will never forget that. Similarly to how the faith leaders at Charlottesville attacked by neonazis will never forget the black bloc anarchists who rushed to put their bodies on the line to save their lives. As an anarchist — and the overwhelming majority of “antifa” are also diligent anarchists who reject the state as an ethical means — I’ve remained in the same circles and listened to what they’ve had to say over the years as I’ve traveled from city to city, country to country. I’ve remained consistently impressed by their scholarship, consideration, and bravery.

As full-blown fascist and white nationalist groups have recently started using the political rise of Donald Trump to infiltrate conservative protests or activism, the situation has grown more complex. And it has also become more fraught as “antifa” has suddenly entered the popular lexicon, almost warped beyond recognition. The overly-nuanced research nerds living in praiseless obscurity that I knew have abruptly been cast as violence worshipping thugs, or frothing naive college kids looking to punch anyone problematic. This is, as all anarchists know, absolutely incorrect, although such cartoonish and disconnected narratives clearly further the agendas of both liberals and conservatives. Sadly, in some respects this media narrative becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy that marginalizes longstanding antifa groups, and casts things into much broader conflict of Trump supporters (as “nazis”) versus any and all Trump opponents (as “antifa”), an astonishingly ignorant framing that only benefits fascist entryists and helps spread misinformation via mainstream partisan paranoia.

But there clearly are important ethical and strategic challenges that the mainstream analysis among antifascist activists presents to the rest of us.

• When nazis hold a march with guns through a jewish neighborhood is that really just a matter of open discourse?
• Where does a reasonable boundary of “imminence” or “likelihood” to a threat get drawn?
• How many people need to be killed and at what frequency for us to see ourselves as at war?
• If a group organizes so that one wing works as streetfighters and murderers and another wing as public spokesmen and recruiters should we really be obligated to treat them as distinct groups or at what point should we see them as the same entity?

Many of these questions would be revolting if it was the leviathan state itself we were trusting to judge such distinctions. But we are anarchists, and as autonomous individuals our ethical responsibilities and capacities are different. Where institutions may have to behave as rule consequentialists lest their bureaucratic momentum carry them to terrible places, individual minds have the agency — and responsibility — to often behave more as act consequentialists, capable of recognizing nuance and context in ways that are more finely grained. Rather than sticking with hamfisted rules we can examine the specific context of each possible action before us.

I agree with the dominant antifascist critique of liberalism and its shortsightedness. Liberals do not grasp the threat posed by fascism – they over-privilege the perceived stability of their institutions and the status quo. They codify simplistic codes of behavior modeled upon the state’s legal system – and naturally, the fascists can run rings around these. Liberals happily legitimize fascists through debate, failing to realize that the game fascists are playing isn’t the game of reason, but the game of psychological appeals. As a practical matter fascism succeeds in debate – in the sense of quickly mobilizing enough of the population to achieve its aims — because the truth is complex, whereas false but simplistic narratives are often more emotionally resonant.

Most longstanding antifa groups are obviously and explicitly not out to singlehandedly win the long war against fascism, but to win the immediate battles necessary for our survival. In the long run fascism will never be defeated by fists but by all the shit like empathy and science that fascism is bad at. It will ultimately be defeated by making the world a better place, by tackling the deeper psychological and sociological dynamics that make fascism possible. We will only truly win when we achieve a world of plenty without oppression, where social hierarchy and dominance games become finally lost to history. That day is obviously far fucking off. It’s important we continue to diligently work towards it, to continue growing the roots of such a world.

But it is also important that we fucking survive to see it. We cannot afford to privilege the future entirely over the present just as we cannot afford to privilege the present entirely over the future. Fascists mobilizing in the streets pose a relatively immediate existential risk to many communities. The situation we now face with not just a police force but an executive branch deeply infested with and sympathetic to outright white nationalists poses unique problems not reducible to the struggles that kicked neonazi thugs out of American cities in the 80s, 90s and 00s, but we also can’t afford to ignore the experience and insights from those struggles.

Much of the “debate” over free speech and the now longstanding analyses that have developed among antifascist activists combating fascism has been profoundly disconnected from the dangers of fascist organizing and the history of antifascist activism. It’s weird hearing conservative media personalities repeating the narrative, “ANTIFA is a bunch of thugs opposed to free speech, they’re the real fascists” that a decade ago you’d only hear from shitty metal bros upset a band they like was exposed as neonazis and boycotted. But among sincere critics of antifa orgs in anarchist circles I think the underlying tension is one not just of philosophy, but of deeply varying takes on the strategic landscape.

Antifa approaches are not remotely designed to win hearts and minds among the wider population, but to stop fascist thugs from metastasizing in numbers by demonstrating unopposed strength. I am deeply sympathetic to forms of activism that do not attempt to “win votes” but just directly solve a problem, even if that problem is just the momentary survival of civilization. However it is true that there’s a degree to which today’s alt-right recruits via different mechanisms than the neonazis of the 80s, pulling from a much larger and more mainstream base that they’re attempting to radicalize using antifascist violence as a boogeyman.

Although those activists actually doing antifascist work on the ground are in many ways epistemically privileged compared to us offering pointers from the peanut gallery – the exact best recipe of strategies to counter this current wave of white nationalist organizing clearly remains an open question.

I hope that this Mutual Exchange will bring some of these complex issues into greater clarity and perhaps defuse the feedbacking tribal suspicions that can occur in the absence of discourse. I have criticisms of some things and some developments under the expansive banner of “antifa” (as most antifa do themselves) but I find their arguments on the whole potent and persuasive.

This is a tough topic because to most people the stakes seem immense and thus there’s an instinct to shy away from anything that could open a rhetorical crack to whatever potential horrific darkness you feel is pressing in. I hope that we can do better, and perhaps find our way towards some kind of meta-resolution.

Since we’re talking about actually existing antifascist groups I will largely follow their lead and stick to using “fascist” in the specific political sense of the broadly hyper-nationalist authoritarian anti-modernists and anti-globalists in the tradition of Mussolini, Hitler, Schmitt, Evola, et al. rather than the abstract philosophical sense of ANY extreme authoritarianism, tribalism, or amoral power worship. Sure there’s degrees of “fascism” to be found in everything, from the sitcoms we watch to the layout of our neighborhood grocery store, and those sort of sweeping philosophical conversations can be enlightening, just as there’s also a place for comparisons of authoritarian liberals like Hillary Clinton to fascists, but let’s try to stick with the sieg heiling numbskulls. For the sake of brevity — unlike antifa groups which tend towards nerdy precision – I will also refer sweepingly and colloquially to a variety of white nationalists in the fascist tradition as “nazis.” I don’t feel that any ethically important distinctions are lost in such language.

I will break my opening piece into five parts: 1) Why free speech matters. 2) Why fascists constitute a real and pressing threat. 3) A defense in the abstract for each of antifascist activists’ most prominent means — reporting, boycotting, doxing, physical defense, and proactive physical disruption, as well as responses to other more abstract critiques. 4) Critical feedback on some tendencies in antifascist strategy in the present context. 5) A challenge to sincere critics of present antifascist activists.

Why Free Speech Matters

Even though I expect this to be read as a spirited defense of antifa and their supposed “violations” of free speech, I want to begin with a piece underlining the importance of the ideal of free speech.

Perhaps the most revolting thing about the alt-right’s positioning on “free speech” has been the calculated backlash it has provoked among the younger radical left. If the alt-right says it’s pro anything a certain fraction of the online left will convulsively declare that thing bad, verboten, and out-group. This reactive tribalism has a lot to do with the way that our mediocre information technologies have framed and shaped communication and social-association norms online. It’s hard to know who some rando is online or where they stand on important things, so people fetishize and overreact to whatever signifiers they can find to try and clear out the trolls and assure some level of productive mutual agreement in their circles or secure some basic social norms.

“Free speech” has started to become nothing more than a signifier of a certain kind of internet troll that uses the phrase as an empty shield, and thus many people convulse to repel anyone invoking such an outgroup phrase. In the process, some legitimate critiques of misapplications of “free speech” have gotten spread and applied widely. The meme signaling wars have gotten so bad than in some places it’s basically obligatory that you respond with something like “muh freeze peach” immediately upon the invocation of “free speech” lest you yourself be revealed as in the grip of the dumbass outgroup.

This is unproductive.

Just because “free speech” is often misapplied by liberals to defend neonazi organizing or intimidation rallies, doesn’t mean that we can afford to discard such an important ideal or its centrality. The misapplication of “free speech” as some kind of myopic legalism that can be invoked by chortling bullies to still our resistance should not eclipse the underlying value.

As anarchists we seek to promote and expand freedom. But in order for people to have agency in their lives and surroundings they must have an accurate model of the world. Freedom is literally impossible in ignorance. If you don’t know the consequences or context of your actions you can’t meaningfully be said to choose them. Freedom of information — the even more radical and expansive version of “freedom of speech” — is about expanding access to information, and not just the most bare particulars, but the full context of things. This includes the social context, the conversations, the evaluations, debate of ideas, and yes even the lies. Without access to others’ perspectives, their models and experiences, our understanding of the world would be incredibly impoverished and inaccurate. Understanding is most efficiently reached through openness and collaboration.

We are always tempted to wall off realms of discourse or ideas and claim that some speech has nothing to contribute, has zero value, but there’s inherently a danger that small deviations — small chosen ignorances — can compound until we’re wildly off base. When for example we cease listening to all conservatives entirely we may miss how dire certain evils brewing among their ranks are, we may miss new tangles in their analysis that could spell doom or be derailed in a more productive direction. And we will miss when, like a broken clock, they end up stumbling across a few true things that we’ve all missed.

Epistemic closure is dangerous as hell, and it happens by degrees. A rightfully critical lens towards the capitalist press and US propaganda can warp into “the holodomor never happened. You can’t listen to bourgeois historians.”

Just as centralized violent organizations always risk compounding into the runaway avalanche of full-blown states and empires, so too can small deviations from intellectual diligence spiral out of control. Often we think “oh it’s psychologically useful to believe in some mystical shit” or “sure this creates an echo chamber but it reinforces our friendship” and consider the damage done very small compared to the good. Our monkey brains and their instincts are not fully rational, so we cope with them by engaging in supposedly limited irrationality. We partially trade pursuit of intellectual accuracy for the psychological boosts provided by collectivism, tribalism, mockery, etc. But these self-perpetuate and reinforce, they erode our capacity to see how much damage we’re doing, how far we’ve drifted from a focus on accuracy. Finally the corruption grows until the comforting roar of the in-group becomes so much more powerful than any curiosity or fear of lurking unknowns beyond the enemy’s lines.

The left has always had an absolutely terrible infection with this sort of thing. It’s easy when you’re clearly right on very big pressing issues, to decide that the time for analysis is over and contrast action with intellectual diligence, to suggest that inquiry is counter-revolutionary and demand that all theorizing payoff immediately — either in terms of psychological strengthening or practical means. There’s been decades of people turning up their noses at “abstract” issues and declaring “We’ll solve this through praxis” — when what that really means is “We’ll solve this through trial and error once the shit hits the fan and we don’t actually have time for laborious trial and error.” It’s absolutely no secret that the Left and radical milieus like anarchism have a lurking inclination towards anti-intellectualism — despite at the same time often being bogged in insular references to esoteric terminology and philosophers. Leftists organize collectively and radicals often define ourselves by our activism; as a consequence there will always be a “enough talk, let’s act” pressure towards disparaging abstract or distant communication and analysis — and certainly engagement with anyone problematic.

But such “pragmatism” is fundamentally at odds with radicalism — ie pursuing the roots of things. When we assume that what we have is “good enough” it takes absolutely no time for blindspots to start growing out of control. For decades communists subscribed to the crackpottery of Lysenkoism because the western capitalists just had to also be wrong about Darwinian evolution. In the 90s anti-vaccination wingnuttery was the fucking norm among anarchists, rarely objected to because what are you gonna take the side of big corporations?? The list of such embarrassments for the left is long and horrifying. Our willful blindness has had consequences, sometimes quite dire. How many people have let their simplistic knee-jerk support for “the underdog” and a community echo-chamber lead them down the path of supporting Israel or North Korea or whatever?

Openness and engagement are our fucking values! The very bedrock of anarchism is internationalism, post-nationalism, globalism — to unite the world in collective liberation, in the collaborative creation of teeming cosmopolitanism, finally free of states and the wounds they rip through us and call borders. It’s beyond preposterous and infuriating that those dedicated to closed borders, to the partition and apartheid of humanity, could ever be taken seriously as “free speech” idealists. Even more galling that anyone would let the book burning alt-right attempt to appropriate the mantle of free speech online. The entire fucking point of the internet is to permanently dissolve borders.

Reactionaries have managed to reduce the grand aspirations of free speech to something as inane and disconnected as whether someone can be punched for saying the n-word. They have turned away from Freedom of Information and instead focused on the far more myopic and ultimately incoherent Freedom of Expression. Instead of viewing the flows of information and efficient epistemic processing in society as a whole, they’ve narrow-beamed on whether or not someone can get away with saying whatever they like with no consequences. They have done this in no small part because we have let them. We have allowed the discourse to collapse to mere legalism — to exist only in relation to the state and simplistic codes of behavior.

Basically everyone gets the argument against state censorship. If a single already hyper powerful organization with a near monopoly on violence also gets to determine what information can pass between people resistance to that state becomes truly impossible. It can do whatever it wants and there is no means of stopping it. And the way the legal system works, even a small sliver of justified censorship can rapidly be expanded to censorship of anything. This is why even statists recognize the need to make sure the state can never censor anything — as well as the importance of stopping the state from ever having a true 100% monopoly on violence. In the United States both of these concerns are even codified as Amendments #1 and #2 to its constitution.

But few people can seem to agree on the contours of “free speech” beyond a prohibition on state censorship. The looming presence of the state has so atrophied our capacity to speak of ethics, values and goals outside of it.

Is it free speech to shout over your speech so you can’t be heard? Is it free speech to create a hostile environment to all but the majority perspective so that anyone who deviates is promptly harassed? Is it free speech to feel obligated to give every random ignoramus time on your news channel to say whatever they like? Is it free speech to broadcast the certain ones and zeros that hack someone’s computer?

What exactly are we aiming at here? To even ask that question sounds alien these days because the goal of free speech has been lost to the code of free speech. This reduction has left the whole affair feeling like kids whining in the back seat about some arbitrary set of rules. The bully snottily announcing “this tree is a home base, you can’t punch me back when I’m touching it”. “I’m not actually touching you yet, I’m just organizing hordes of fellow nazis to launch our genocide sometime in the future. What are you gonna go around punching people because of what they MIGHT do later??? You’re okay with punching people for having DIFFERENT OPINIONS???”

If you think about free speech as a goal, as a value to be maximized in the world, rather than some kind of law or contract, the whole issue becomes obvious:

It’s a good rule of thumb to strongly err on the side of engagement and open discourse, to resist anything that might compound into systemic impediments or barriers. But there are going to arise cases where a violation on the small scale leads to advances for connectivity and discourse on the large scale.

Someone can leak a politician’s files (violating their privacy) in the service of saving the privacy of everyone. A physicist can seek to advance our collective understanding by not trying to correct each of the cranks filling her inbox but by going to a conference of her peers instead.

Similarly one can interfere with the public organizing of a group dedicated to suppressing everyone’s freedom of assembly. One can pressure publishers and institutions to not lend prestige and social standing to nazis by featuring them. And one can choose to prioritize engaging with those actually interested in engaging productively, rather than the obvious grifters, charlatans and trolls of the alt-right.

One can boycott segregationist businesses even though both the boycotting activists and the racist owners can be simplified into the absurdly reductive category of “discrimination.” Yet such grouping is obviously nonsense to anyone with an ounce of sense. In exactly the same vein, isolating, de-platforming, and physically kicking nazis off the streets creates a local violation of the ideal of engagement and connectivity within humanity, but saves the whole. In the same way that the internet organically routes around faulty nodes, cutting them out of the network to save the whole. Or a brain tumor is removed before it can sever too many synapses.

Sure there are dangers here. There are always reductios and slippery slopes. We should remain vigilant and wary of the pitfalls. They are great and grave. Broadly tolerant social norms are important, broad engagement is important. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fucking goal. We shouldn’t surrender our ethical responsibility to try to keep the bigger picture in perspective. We shouldn’t trade in ethical vigilance for simplistic rules.

I want to be clear: Credulous conservative hysteria about “antifa out to attack free speech” is largely full of shit, direct narrative collaboration between neonazi entryists and conservative demagogues more interested in mobilizing the base than resisting said entryism. Whether neonazis can march and organize without fear of being punched is pretty far afield from any slip in cultural norms that could lead to the bugaboo of antifascists beating anyone they disagree with. Antifa has stayed studiously on target for a century — much to the derision of the broader left which thinks other concerns, issues and enemies are more pressing. Antifa beating up nazis on the streets in the 80s and 90s never led to a collapse in our civilization’s discourse norms, and despite endless ginned up hysteria by conservatives, no antifa group has ever targeted regular conservatives. The people most effectively pushing for civil war and conflation of conservatives and neonazis are the conservative activists actually getting in bed with the nazi entryists.

But what actually does pose a threat to free speech is leftist reaction to this conservative narrative. For decades, antifa groups have taken a studiously pro free speech line when it comes to statist means — opposing hate crimes legislation and other means of censorship. They correctly realized the damage of such statist means would be far greater than the benefit. But now, a fresh-faced generation of leftists only now getting interested in “antifa” are starting to let themselves be goaded by online trolls into incredibly unstrategic oppositional stances.

It’s not a good thing that monopolistic tech giants are making precedents by removing people from the internet. Huge scale corporate censorship may not be state censorship, but it’s no less uncheckable. And you’d better believe it’ll be turned on anarchists to the roaring approval of the same liberals and conservatives now whining about the rights of nazis. It’s not a good thing when copyright law or norms are expanded dramatically to merely inconvenience a few alt-right trolls. And when leftists cheer for “kicking Russian trolls off twitter” what they’re really cheering for is the fucking nationalization of the internet — a Richard Spencer wet-dream. Such a nationalization would be a rollback of the most important victory us internationalists have ever had. Solutions to the dominance of nazi trolls look like Mastodon — a decentralized open source social network where freedom of association from the bottom up marginalizes nazis — not sweeping universal edicts from authorities on high.

Obviously most anarchists weren’t stupid enough to cheer for state and corporate censorship, but we all encountered a spattering on the broader left who were enthused by such. That is actually dangerous creep with potential consequences. Dumbass leftists mobilized by a shallow understanding of “antifa” formed in reaction to conservative narratives. Not whether anarchist vigilantes continue to punch neonazis waving swastika flags and bust up their spectacles of force.

Antifascists cannot afford to concede to the “free speech” narrative.

Why Fascists Constitute A Unique and Pressing Threat

It’s frankly astonishing and horrifying how widely conservative demagogues have managed to spread the lie that fascists are irrelevant and of little danger. The internet has become filled to the brim with ignorant comments claiming that nazis are so marginal they constitute no real threat. I’ve seen variants of this repeated endlessly from tiresome “centrists” or “libertarians” with reactionary inclinations trying to front as though they’re above the fray of politics: “Everyone gets that nazis are bad, the KKK only has a few thousand members, they’re in no danger of taking power, if anything it’s the SJWs being rude to me on campus that are the real threat.”

Since they suddenly discovered the existence of fascists and antifascist activists, there’s been a broad epidemic of liberals and conservatives using them to score points in their own electoral and culture war battles, all of them blithely assuming that literal fascists pose no threat except as as a rhetorical tool.

Let me clarify several points:

1) There’s a large array of fascists and white nationalists active today. Formal “KKK” membership rolls are almost irrelevant. White supremacist gangs control America’s prisons and much of its streets. In turn these groups are often closely allied with more above ground political groups. Additionally there’s been decades of coordinated white supremacist infiltration of police departments in the US, this provides them incredible cover and institutional sway. We see this from cops who build shrines to nazis to police chiefs who run neonazi record labels. This model is repeated internationally — half the police in Greece vote for the neonazi group Golden Dawn. In recent years the internet has enabled the spread of inane reactionary analyses, as anonymity and connection has enabled secret racists to network and build community. Since many people collect “opinions” only as weapons in psychological or social terms, the edgy positioning of fascist and white nationalist perspectives has infested chan and gamer culture in particular. But it would be wrong to write these losers off as merely posturing, since the exact same loser/troll recruitment trajectory was involved in the rise of the classic KKK and Nazi Party, and /pol/ folks have repeatedly turned their politics into gunfire. The few hundred people with the personal finances and lack of obligations to travel to a Richard Spencer rally are not reflective of some small pool of white supremacists. Any more than a few dozen or hundred anarchists in a given black bloc is representative of the tens of thousands of anarchists active in the US.

2) A very small number of people can do immense damage. Two thousand active Al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq brought the country and the US empire to their knees. A very small number of people can keep a larger population living in terror. Lynchings, church burnings, mosque bombings, and street beatings can cow an entire population. You may not remember the bad old days of the 80s and 90s as it was in many cities — the terror inflicted by neonazis then may not have affected you — but for many it was a nightmare. You don’t have to kill very many people to keep the rest in line, and those that nevertheless stand up or act undaunted are the first to get targeted. While terrorism can have an affective component, some of the responses it garners can be quite rational. If, as a person of color, you run a non-negligible risk of being beaten bloody for walking in your city with a white girlfriend you are going to modify your actions. Active fascist street thugs have a chilling effect. And this is part of the point – why they’ll show up to every left wing event or pride parade or whatever they can if they know they’ll be unopposed. They don’t have to consistently beat those they oppose in order to effectively cow and intimidate them. For decades nazis have been the ones fearful of flying the swastika in public. Today they are trying to reverse that – to make neonazis fearless and anarchists/leftists/libertarians/queers/poc/etc afraid to walk in public. The overhead of activists having to constantly take precautions would impede and demobilize the small but committed sliver of activists presently holding back the reactionary/authoritarian impulses of our institutions. When Hungarian neonazis and cops won the streets from anarchists, many activist fronts were deeply hindered and the government accelerated towards authoritarianism.

3) The danger isn’t 51% of the American population voting for a swastika LARPer on an explicit platform of genocide.  Sure almost no one in the US is going to vote for a politician slathered in Third Reich imagery, but people vary quite dramatically in their analysis of WHY racism and fascism are bad. Just as almost no one explicitly supports “rape” but huge numbers of men happily report having forced sex on other people against their consent without using that term, so to does a large fraction of the populace think whites are oppressed and the US should be centered on whiteness. About a third of the population polls consistently authoritarian, tribalist, and conservative. In many respects they’re almost fascists a few steps behind in self-recognition. Although those steps do matter and we should do everything to stop them from waking up, we need to recognize that such reactionaries constitute a powerful base. For example, the hordes of people shouting “nuke em till they glow” after 9/11 revealed themselves as bootlicking genocide enthusiasts. Such thuggish near-sociopaths are an eclectic bunch, self-centered, stupid, opportunist, and hard to truly unify and mobilize to their full potential, but they do provide a broad recruitment base for fascists and they have shown they will happily vote for and violently defend fascistic policies. Given a slow ratchet of fascism, there is no breaking moment where we can expect basic ethics to trump their authoritarian instincts and tribal loyalties. The danger isn’t that the KKK persuades a hundred million people to join it and then wins elections and institutes fascist rule. That’s a strawman built on incredibly naive political notions. The danger is that the fascist fringe spreads terror, pushes the overton window to make hyper-nationalism and racism acceptable in public, and gradually detaches the actual power of the state (the police and their guns) from the more reserved liberal legal apparatus supposedly constraining them. Explicit fascist street gangs are not going to get millions of votes any time soon, but the danger is that they will they draw in thousands of recruits if they are allowed to appear powerful and legitimate and the impact on our country’s climate would be dramatic, severely impeding anarchist, leftist, and libertarian activism, and unleashing the state’s authoritarian inclinations. Tens of millions of people could be deported, arrested, harassed, raided, jumped on the streets, etc, without any politician ever explicitly flying a swastika or wearing a white hood. As bad as shit was under imperialist liberal presidents like Obama, it could become a hell of a lot worse with an unsuppressed fascist vanguard.

It’s important to debunk a common illusion: the fascists never magically went away. They remained in great numbers after the Second World War. Fascism was never defeated by persuasion, it was defeated by force. Most of the millions that filled the ranks of fascist movements in the firsts half of the twentieth century went to their graves still believing in aspects of fascism. Even in America there was no deconversion per se of the vast number of american Nazis. Watch this video of 20,000 Americans sieg heiling in Madison Square and remember that many who aligned against the nazis in world war two weren’t aligned against the ideology of nazism but against the German foreigners. Further the Cold War kept fascism quite alive in many places. We all know that the allied governments snatched up nazi scientists and bureaucrats after the war, but there was rarely any attempt to address their ideology. Large parts of the US government were sympathetic, saw the nazis as merely over-zealous anti-communists. Kissinger even made moves to bring the nazis back to power in West Germany in hopes that they would serve as a bulwark against communism. And the Soviets in turn helped maintain a reactionary and authoritarian culture — the success of modern fascist activity in Europe maps almost perfectly to the old iron curtain, those formerly under Soviet rule far more likely to long for a return to the simplicity of authoritarianism.

It was force that put fascism in remission, and it has been anti-authoritarian cosmopolitan pop culture that was capable of slowly killing it over generations while it remained in remission. But the operative word is slowly. The values of liberty win out in the long run, but fascism can metastasize very quickly in the short term if it is not constantly and diligently suppressed.

Today it is once again flaring up and much of the antifascist activist infrastructure maintained throughout earlier decades has lapsed or been slow to respond. While antifa groups debated academically in late 2015 whether or not Donald Trump could properly be called a “fascist”, actual undeniable fascists have flooded into the ranks of Trump protests and online communities. And online subcultures already increasingly turning to reaction started gobbling up the garbage of actual full-fledged nazis.

Every observer is in agreement that we’ve seen an upsurge in white nationalist and fascist organizing. But I want to put that in terms of just some of the deaths that this organizing has already caused:

• In June 2015, Dylann Roof was inspired by the “hate facts” posted on Daily Stormer and Council of Conservative Citizens to murder nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
• In July 2015, John Russell Houser, a far-right former bar owner, shot and killed two people and injured nine others before committing suicide in a Lafayette, LA movie theater which was playing a feminist film. Houser praised the actions of Adolf Hitler on online message boards.
• In November of 2015, a group of well-armed 4chan regulars attended a Black Lives Matter camp in Minneapolis, harassing them with racial slurs. They opened fire on activists attempting to chase them out when they returned a second night, wounding five.
• In August of 2016 a black teen named Larnell Bruce was run down for sport outside of Portland by a white supremacist member of European Kindred named Russell Courtier.
• On Inauguration day an antifascist protester of Milo Yiannopolous was shot in stomach by Elizabeth Hakoana, who came to the protest with her husband, who planned to “crack skulls” of the “snowflakes” at the event and provoke a reaction to justify shooting someone. (Notably that antifa protester refused to help send them to prison, and insisted on restorative justice rather than revenge.)
• Later in January, Alexandre Bisonette, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, opened fire on a Quebec City Islamic Culutral Center, killing six.
• In February, a white U.S. Navy veteran, Adam Purinton, 51, killed an Indian engineer, wounded his Indian co-worker, and shot a man who tried to stop the murder at a bar in Olathe, KS while yelling “get out of my country.”
• In March, James Jackson, a subscriber of Alt Right Youtube channels, traveled from Baltimore to New York with the sole purpose of murdering a black person at random. He stabbed Timothy Caughman, killing him.
• In May a fight between a former neonazi and his two neonazi roomates who were building bombs to destroy civil infrastructure, led to the deaths of two of them.
• In May Sean Christopher Urbanski, a University of Maryland student and member of online alt-right facebook groups, randomly stabbed to death black Army Officer Richard Collins III in Baltimore.
• Self-proclaimed nihilist and neonazi Jeremy Christian (former supporter of Sanders but consistent racist), who had marched in alt-right protests, stabbed 3 people in Portland who intervened to tell him to stop yelling racist remarks to two young girls on a light rail train, instantly killing two.
• In May the white supremacist Anthony Robert Hammond hacked a random black man with a machete after yelling racial slurs at numerous people in Clearlake, CA.
• And of course in August James Alex Fields Jr, an admirer of Hitler who worked with the white supremacist and fascist group Vanguard America, drove down peaceful protesters injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer.

These are just some of the highest profile cases in that time. It doesn’t include many brutal murders between neonazis or written off by police as simply part of their crime. For example neonazis in my home town skinned a rival with a belt-sander and dumped his body in public on a major city street. For a much longer and more detailed list of just incidents within 2017 see this post filled with examples and citations.

And see also these summaries from Snopes and even a liberal org that despises antifa. And of course this doesn’t scratch the surface of the unending history of fascists shooting anarchists and antifascists, from Lin Newborn and Daniel Shersty to Luke Querner.

Meanwhile absolutely no antifascist has killed anyone or come close. The incredible restraint that antifascists have shown in this war is remarkable in context.

The “left” — mostly broadly construed — can maybe lay claim to a few murders in this time. If we assume that police and politicians aren’t valid targets then in July of 2016 Micah Xavier Johnson killed five police officers in Dallas and Gavin Eugene Long killed three in Baton Rogue, and in June of this year James T. Hodgkinson shot a congressman and four others. Each of these was massively hyped by the mainstream media – the eternal running dogs of both cops and politicians — but the statistics make the picture clear:

Over the past 10 years (2007-2016), domestic extremists of all kinds have killed at least 372 people in the United States. Of those deaths, approximately 74% were at the hands of right-wing extremists, about 24% of the victims were killed by domestic Islamic extremists, and [2%] were killed by left-wing extremists.” [source]

I’m not particularly interested in defending the left at large, I’m no fan of it and there are statist communists who worship regimes just as horrific and murderous as fascist ones, but the disparity here is profound. And that disparity would of course remain if we counted murders at the hands of the police or military or state policy. We should also note that the black nationalists responsible for police killings are pretty far afield from antifa and anarchism — being staunchly anti-nationalist. At various points in history black nationalists and statist communists have made alliances with white nationalists and fascists, whereas anarchists and anti-fascists would obviously rather die first.

If we’re talking about antifascists specifically then at best they’ve thrown a few punches at rallies crawling with out white nationalists and neonazi entryists. Among the thousands of community members that showed up in Berkeley for an antifascist organized rally a few broke some windows and set a lamp on fire. And in a mass demonstration a Trump supporter in a wheelchair was shoved by some rando and the blame assigned to “antifa.” Meanwhile most every viral story of “antifa punched this dude just for being a Trump supporter” is inevitably debunked when the dude in the red cap is revealed to be a known white supremacist entryist who was throwing punches before the tiny snippet of video put on twitter. And yet social media is covered with even more outrageous lies:

1) That antifa fought alongside ISIS in syria (using a picture of antifa volunteers who fought ISIS and were showing off their liberation of ISIS territory and smashing of its billboard). 2) That antifa threatened to attack an annual parade in Portland because republicans would be marching (the only piece of evidence being an absurdly written anonymous email that the longstanding local antifa organization Rose City Antifa dismissed). 3) That antifa called for the beating of women who voted for Trump (in actuality a pretty open /pol/ disinformation campaign). 4) That antifa called for the murder of pets belonging to white nationalists (exposed as a misinformation campaign by antifa groups, when in fact neonazis HAVE actually in the past killed the pets of antifascist activists). On and on it goes. One can’t keep up with the lies. My favorite gem was when antifascists made a snarky sarcastic banner demanding the money Soros was purportedly paying them and conservative blogs dutifully reported on the banner as if it was real.

The demonization of antifa through feverish projection has become a self-perpetuating avalanche. Reactionaries make up whatever they can because it must be close enough to the bogeyman they assume “antifa” is and in turn assume any nonsense they hear is true.

We’re in a situation of extreme asymmetry. There’s intense threat from the fascist fringe and intense demonization of the antifascist fringe that used to keep them in check.

“Okay but what about the leftists!?? You see the damn SJW menace everywhere and they’re far more popular and now they’re punching people and getting guns. They may not be killing people now, but eventually!”

This is a classic cognitive bias where the near enemy blinds you to the distant enemy. Sure there are far more leftists and SJWs than neonazis. But there is absolutely zero chance of radical leftists enacting their goals through collaboration with the police state. The cops will never in a million years arrest you up for not being vegan, but they routinely murder people for being black. The police state is hyper-right-wing. We can mostly survive higher taxes and a stupid centralized health care system, tens of millions of people won’t survive an ethnonationalist policy. Tens of millions will live in fear under the boot of fascist thugs in collaboration with the police.

The vast majority of the radical left in America are anti-authoritarian fellow travelers to anarchists who generally forswear use of statist means. They’re incapable of organizing systematic or institutional means of oppression. You can’t build a Stasi or KGB if you’re fundamentally opposed to anything that looks like police. There are statist communists in America, but they’re far smaller in number and even more profoundly out of sync with the populace.

Absolute worst case is the state communists start some minor Shining Path style terrorist insurgency and the SJWs college kids create environments where dissent from arbitrary ideological lines or cultural norms is punished by ruthless social ostracization or condemnation. That would be bad, but it would certainly be survivable. There wouldn’t be tens of millions of forced deportations and a regime of random street murders. Mostly some folks would feel like they couldn’t say some things without risking their jobs. There’s just no comparison in terms of human suffering.

And further, let’s be clear, while there’s toxic elements to corners of SJW culture, without subsidy from institutional violence the norms they’re capable of spreading are largely rational ones predicated upon real arguments about damage to minorities that actually resonate with people. While sometimes small communities are capable of forming echo-chambers to reinforce some arbitrary party line, those norms have little memetic potency. But over the last two decades in the explosion of voices from previously oppressed people, a great many people have been persuaded of the things they have to say. Things like “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” have rational and persuasive foundations even if they also have obvious misuses. It shouldn’t be radical to point out that small acts of minor racial prejudice or lack of understanding add up in effect. People sometimes need breathers where they can hang with people with the same experiences, to have new conversations built off of shared knowledge rather than contest the same 101 debates with those ignorant of their experiences. The occasional toxicity of SJW discourse is not what has driven its explosion, such occasional toxicity is rather parasitic on its underlying rational potency.

SJW critiques of our social norms are winning out in no small part because they’re often quite well reasoned anarchist critiques, albeit rather defanged for liberal consumption. There are of course dangers of tribalism and echo-chambers, but in the absence of a hunger for violent institutional power, the only damage this ultimately does is to one’s own cause.

Certainly the toxic or hamfisted failings of SJW land have played a role in inspiring broad reactionary movements. But fascists aren’t merely just reactionaries. Plenty of people hear the word “privilege” and curdle in rage (“how dare you tell me that I’m privileged, you don’t know me, I’ve suffered so, I’ve earned what I got” or “privilege implies the freedoms I have aren’t rights but something you can take away”). The broad reactionary subculture engendered by gamergate, MRAs, etc, that poses itself as “anti-sjw” is clearly a recruiting base for fascists, but they are also quite frequently not full-blown fascists. There have always been reactionaries furious at social advancements – that is always dangerous, but fascist recruitment takes things further.

I’ve written at length before about fascist organizing, but the long and short of it is that fascism recruits through appeals to our cheapest monkey brain needs. As a purer, and rather uniquely self-aware flavor of authoritarianism/tribalism, fascism prospers by directly promising brute power and social belonging. Fascism strips away the complexities of agency, of freedom, of individualism, of intellectual vigilance, and offers instead comforting simplicities. In the astonishingly self-aware words of Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer:

“We feel emasculated. Many of us feel we have never had power. We crave power. We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will give us power. A group that will confirm our worth as men. We do not have identities. We want identities.”

To satiate such gut-level needs, fascists make gut-level appeals. An authoritarian can talk forever about how he’s gonna give you power, but an authoritarian that visibly, viscerally demonstrates power, that’s the authoritarian who will successfully recruit.

Fascists make a mockery of debate intentionally, in the authoritarian mind it’s inherently just positioning and only fools take ideas seriously. From such a perspective the fascist that discards the existing norms, that dances around in a flagrantly bad faith way, demonstrates a kind of strength in honesty. The only honesty, in their mind, being that truth and ideas don’t matter. Power matters, power through deception and manipulation — the capacity to get someone to put you on a stage, in a position of respect, despite your flagrant dishonesty — and power through physical strength — the capacity to march in the open, in great numbers, with weapons, with muscles, trappings of masculinity, displays of wealth, etc. Widespread mockery can hurt fascists by demonstrating their unpopularity, but so long as they have other sorts of power to fall back on the fascist can simply tell himself “this is the real power, this is the only thing that actually matters, what those people have is fake and hollow, that they will be overthrown.” [source]

Fascists have thus no allegiance to truth — they are rather, as any denizen of the internet knows all too well, closely align with trolls, not good-faith debaters. Hence the situation we find ourselves in where the alt-right is most known for making lies and disinformation faster than can be debunked. Fascism is fundamentally rooted in a nihilistic anti-intellectualism where truth becomes nothing more than a game of narrative construction.

The problem is that while the Flat Earther might be happy to spit out 100 arguments that the earth is not a globe and sucker in a few thousand rubes who want to feel special, like they have secret suppressed knowledge that makes them elite, the fascist also appeals to a power fantasy. “All those elites with the cultural or social capital you don’t have, making you feel excluded. You don’t have to climb the ladder of laboriously figuring out anti-racist terminology and conventions just to not be mocked, and you’d probably never be accepted as cool shit anyway cuz you’re a white cis dude, and anyway you might have to give some shit up, fuck that, let’s just kill them all and grind their haughty faces into the dirt, teach them that raw TRUE power was what mattered all along.” There is a large reactionary base in our society, for whom such fantasies are utterly seductive. The only thing keeping a large and dangerous fraction of them from leaping into the streets sieg-heiling is self-preservation. A fear of the ramifications.

It is of course important that we tackle the underlying reactionary base, but progress there will take ages, in the meantime it’s absolutely necessary that we keep the ramifications so dire that few self-interested reactionary sociopaths see a net upside to signing up with them. This means denying them all pretense of legitimacy and acceptability in civil society. And it means preventing them from successfully staging spectacles of jackbooted force – like their intimidation rallies.

In Defense Of Antifascist Activism

For decades antifa have served a niche role as watchmen, as relatively lonely nazi hunters and researchers. Their ranks would occasionally swell when a particularly noticeable infection of fascists cropped up, as local community members would step up to join in resisting them. But what has happened in the last two years is utterly off the scale.

It’s a little stunning to be an anarchist in this context. It’s like watching an impassioned national conversation about Food Not Bombs or Anarchist Black Cross. A longtime staple of the anarchist movement, a franchised friendly neighborhood project the rest of us don’t think about much, has been weirdly thrust into the spotlight. Literally everyone is scrambling to identify with it or against it, and to redefine it into their personal political narratives.

Trump is both central to this recent story and at the same time almost entirely vestigial. He’s a reflexively authoritarian political figure who has aptly played to the nativist and racist tendencies in his reactionary base far more explicitly than arguably even Nixon, but he’s also an idiot opportunistic figurehead being used and bounced between different forces. While Trump himself will do some immense amount of damage — like all Presidents — the unique dangers of his presidency are that he’ll serve as a catalyst to fascist and reactionary forces. Will he effectively unleash the police and set off this century’s Palmer raids of dissidents? Will he institute mass deportations and ethnic cleansing? Fuck, it, will he start a war that kills tens of millions? These questions hang in the air every day. They are important and pressing and we must be ready to resist them but, policy is not a traditional concern of antifascists. There’s already an array of activist institutions in some sense prepared to deal with these potential atrocities. In contrast, what antifascists have focused on is fascist organizing. In keeping the seemingly marginal nuts, marginal.

Now the wall keeping explicit fascists out of society has mostly come down and no one knows what comes next.

While antifascists are adapting and innovating, so far they have responded mostly by escalating their traditional means of reporting, doxing, and physically disrupting fascist organizing. This laser focus has its benefits, but it just as clearly has its downsides. Antifascist groups were formed to organize community self defense against nazis, not to win a media battle in the mainstream. Their skillset is investigative reporting, organizing and physical resistance, not media narrative crafting. As a result they were obviously completely unprepared to counter the abrupt mainstreaming of fascism into the public discourse, handle the rapid rise in people identifying as “antifa”, or counter narratives painting antifa as somehow bad.

At the root of the bad press antifa has been getting and the success of reactionaries in spreading lies about them is a tension over “media relations” and public outreach that anarchists have felt for ages.

“Worrying about whether we’re giving them material for their lies is a fool’s neuroticism. They’re going to make up fake news anyway—turning a fascist who lost a fight into an innocent bystander or lending credence to the guy who stabbed himself and blamed antifa. The truth is that most pundits (on the right and supposed left) are happy to fall for these “vicious antifa” stories because these pundits are more concerned with order than justice. For them, people fighting in the street over politics will always conjure images of other countries where they don’t want to live. It upsets them.” [source]

Your reaction to this will depend in no small part on whether you think the war for public opinion is critical or centrally important to the struggle against fascism. I think the real challenge of the Trump era is that the public opinion and media narrative game HAS started to matter in a way that wasn’t previously true when it came to antifascist activism. But I’m not convinced that public opinion or media narratives are of such importance as to eclipse all other issues. I think it’s worth critically evaluating that assumption. Most Americans grow up indoctrinated in the assumptions of liberal democracy, shaping our every instinct to think that winning public opinion or “a majority” is the definition of success. There’s often a lot of baggage preventing people from evaluating or really thinking in terms of direct action – of just getting a thing done, regardless of whether you’re widely hated for doing it. Running the underground railroad in the antebellum south was not remotely about winning hearts and minds among the white population – it was about immediately freeing slaves. Going against the wishes of the majority not to eventually persuade them, but to directly impede their capacity to oppress is often a quite valid means. We would today rightfully scoff at those condemning the underground railroad for “undermining the struggle for public opinion” by breaking the law and thus contributing to white fears. And we could spin a similar analogy here when it came to vigilante violence against slave owners.

It’s important to remember that antifascist groups exist in large part because anarchists don’t trust the state to respond to white supremacists (and Islamists like ISIS), and want to disrupt the organizing of such would-be-tyrants without appealing to the state’s cancerous monopoly on violence. Much of the historic squabbling between antifascists and liberal groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center has centered around precisely whether the state can be trusted with “hate crimes” laws or “anti-extremism” efforts.

I keep saying “anarchist” because let’s be honest — despite there being liberal, socialist, and libertarian members of antifa groups, antifascism has been predominately an anarchist project since the end of the second world war, championed and directed by anarchists. Especially in the United States where antifascism is overwhelmingly an anarchist project. Antifascist work is necessarily done in secret with no reward of social capital and no hierarchical machinery to seize, and thus has been of little interest to statist communists who prefer infiltrating and seizing control over liberal organizations.

Of course antifa is varied, active for decades across numerous countries, in a variety of contexts. The European model is more broad subcultural and marxist-influenced, the American model both more tightly organized and anarchist. But differences abound between regions and countries. And antifa groups or campaigns often emerge in ways specific to subcultures and scenes. Fascists have consistently tried to build subcultural bases by infiltrating and corrupting existing ones, and so you get people in skinhead, punk, goth, metal, paganism, libertarianism, etc, exposing and pushing back against them. Naturally these antifa all look different and take different approaches. But if there’s universal conclusions one can extract it’s that it’s worth being hated if you’re also able to rally people to expel a popular band or figure, and that in many circumstances only a willingness to use physical force will get the job done.

The pattern I’ve witnessed over two decades is that committed antifa groups will consistently win the structural war against fascist entryism — but also suffer what wounds the fascists can inflict in retreat: usually lingering hostilities simmering among a minority of the scene who lap up the parting lines of the fascists pushed out about how antifa are tyrannically censoring innocent edgelords. This kind of simmering resentment is perpetuated by low-information scene members who repeat whatever lies are told to them. They’ll spend years denouncing antifa for protesting a band and never bother to actually read antifa’s report proving the band’s fascist affinities. It’s almost hilarious the regularity with which I derail a long-time hater of antifa I’ve met by just looking up the relevant article with google and reading it aloud. “Oh”, they say, crestfallen, “I guess I hadn’t heard that evidence,” having never fucking read the points of the side they demonize.

This is a point I was myself somehow surprised to discover years ago. Far from being frothing hysterics out to witchhunt anyone and everyone under a sloppy notion of “fascism”, antifa — in the sense of longstanding groups like those in the TORCH Network  — are painfully reserved and accurate in their exposes. Almost to the point of being boring.

Indeed it’s quite arguable that a good fraction of the blame for the situation we’re all in lies in fact that many antifa dragged their feet in response to Trump. Antifa activists and academics debated internally whether Trump was technically “fascist” and in many cases seemed paralyzed about how to respond to fascists and white nationalists using the electoral organizing as a cover. Most anarchists were absolutely loath to be seen as taking a side in American electoral politics, even as the situation grew more and more desperate.  

If anything I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated reading antifa sites as they painstakingly adopt terms like “white nationalist” or “alt-right” rather than just calling the scumbag in question a nazi. While I admire the intellectual diligence and strive to at least some approximation of it, but this does seem to be playing a different sort of public relations or “respectability” game – hoping to be admired for accuracy by the few academics still reading antifa blogs while letting Fox News spread absolute nonsense unopposed to the wider populace. There obviously aren’t easy resolutions to the conflict between hyper accurate language to better serve a few elite readers and more rhetorically charged broadness to convey a truth to a wider audience in general terms.

I do however like how this passage from Atlanta Antifa navigates the obfuscated mess around Milo “not technically a nazi” Yiannopoulos with accuracy but also with a certain succinct clarity:

“[Milo] relies on racist tropes, has spread Nazi propaganda, who spread anti-Muslim hate, who attacks transgendered people and singles them out in his speeches, who has made apologetic statements about pedophilia, spouts misogynistic shit, who writes for Brietbart a known far-right website which supports and promotes white nationalist and racist ideas, has employed known neo-Nazis and white nationalists… So he’s not just some run of the mill conservative. And if you’re claiming he is, then you’re admitting that conservatives are complicit with all of those aspects mentioned above.”  

Of course now we all know that Milo literally had nazi minutia for his passwords and happily sung to a sieg-heiling crowd.

It bears repeating a thousand times: despite conservative hysteria that pattern-matches actual antifa to random mean lefties by comparing them to nazis on twitter and thus freaks out that “they’ll be punching any GOP member next!!!” antifascists have stayed resolutely and precisely on target over the decades.  There’s plenty of deliberately constructed grey area around literal neonazis – things like the ProudBoys that claim not to be racist, and only embrace the hypernationalist patriarchal components of fascism, but still recruit and collaborate with white nationalists and neonazi gangs, as well as adopting much iconography and cultural signifiers from bonehead nazi thugs. It would be obviously amiss for antifascist activists to ignore such auxiliaries and attempts at obfuscation, but they nevertheless struggle to avoid intellectually-dishonest conflation. And when the fascist activity dries up in a region so too does antifascist activism. Those activists happily go back to normal lives or sedate leftist activism like building community centers. They don’t go looking for new targets to call “nazis.”

More flies with honey and the issue of timescales

Let’s start with something that I see crop up in almost every critique of a specific line someone doesn’t like antifa crossing. The argument tends to go something like this: “One of the reasons (condemning, protesting, doxing, punching, etc) nazis is bad is that it makes them feel bad, which hardens them in their position.”

What’s so interesting about these “catch more flies with honey than vinegar” arguments is how rarely they get applied consistently. Literally any level of meaningful opposition is going to make nazis “feel bad” and harden many in resistance. Should we be greeting them instead with a hug and a blowjob in hopes that — between mouthfuls — we’re able to get in some convincing points? And do you advocate the same thing for dealing with ISIS? Should we be trying to win ISIS members over with honey and meanwhile critique the Kurds for shooting at them because “it’ll only harden them”?

Some may argue that the degree of hardening is different between different ethical tiers. The person who thinks a certain type of doxxing is unethical might say that “I’m not opposed to you putting his personal information online with screenshots of his nazi statements, but when they put his mother’s phone number online because she was paying his bills that was a step too far” and okay, sure, fine, there’s certainly an ethical case that doxing family members causes unacceptable collateral damage on potential innocents, that’s an argument I personally happen to agree with (unless the mom is a nazi too). That case can and should be made. But what is totally invalid is the frequent move to then pull the “and this is only going to make the nazi more disinclined to change” card. This line of argument presumes that the nazi makes the same ethical category distinctions that the critic does! The nazi may in fact care a lot about being personally exposed and very little about his mother’s phone number getting shuffled in. Similarly it’s frankly preposterous when non-aggression hardliners use this argument over whether or not to punch a nazi preemptively or only after he punches first. If a nazi has rejected and laughed at the non-aggression principle I think we can safely say the only thing that matters to him is that he got punched — any punching is going to “harden” him in equal measure (if it does at all), regardless of whether that punching falls on one side or another of your personal ethical categories. If we’re truly to optimize for “not making nazis harden in their way” you’ve gotta recognize that’s going to cut in weird directions. Completely humiliating someone in a debate can often harden that person in their politics far more than a punch will. Further the exact opposite is often true — for a lot of people physical repercussions can suddenly make their online game real in a way that scares them straight.

And let’s remember that if getting punched or shamed for being a “merely” ironic half-committed nazi makes someone more likely to lean into the nazi life, chances are he was going to go down that path anyway, regardless of specific prompts. We should take the “you meanly characterized me as a nazi for being an ethno-nationalist in every meaningful way so now I might as well fly an outright swastika, see what you’ve done??” about as seriously as any other sociopath deciding to revel in their actual values the moment they can no longer hide. As the immortal tweet goes “If I started calling this guy a pig-fucker for a few months, he’d start going to the farm for dates“

I’m not saying there’s no value to deconverting fascists or drawing them in with honey. There clearly is value to that, albeit in the proper context. But 1) it’s something that takes time compared to metastasizing threat fascists pose on the street. And 2) there’s already a large liberal NGO apparatus for deconverting fascists. Trump naturally cut all funding for such programs, but they’re precisely the sort of thing that moderates will already open their checkbooks for. In short the marginal ROI is presently very low on that kind of activism compared to the more dangerous and risky exposing and confronting of active fascist organizing.

However I will note that there are antifa organizations who also work in this space — for example providing alternative support networks to people coming out of prison or under the thumb of nazis within — as with some of the work of the Pacific Northwest Anti-Fascist Workers Collective. Typically anarchists gravitate towards the kind of work that can only be done by people who don’t give a fuck about the law. NGOs have to play it safe, but anarchist activist groups can happily keep shit confidential or assist in ways that would be a legal liability for a non-profit.

There are countless things that must be built over the long term to permanently dig the grave of fascism. Providing exits for people out of fascist movements is just one of them. Broad cultural changes are incredibly important. We will never finally win until anti-authoritarian cosmopolitan values pervade society so deeply that fascism is unthinkable. Such a victory will take love and art and science and all the things free people do better than fascists. But there are different timescales to be considered.

Antifascist activists obviously shouldn’t entirely ignore the long term, but this is a triage situation. Eating healthier will impede the odds of cancer in the long term, but when you’ve actually got cancer you don’t need kale, you need to fucking cut it out of you ASAP.

Smug liberal activists just discovering antifascism love to jump in with the absolutely inane commentary that “antifa isn’t solving the long-term problem of fascism.” Of course it fucking isn’t.

You wouldn’t claim that an anarchist member of the French Maquis was under the illusion that fascism would be forever vanquished by her bullets, but goddamn, the point is that said bullets might secure our survival for a few more years so we can also work on all those longer-term solutions.

I’m all about the long-term, and anarchism has spent centuries raising the alarm about short term fixes that impede our ultimate goals. But there is another side to the equation. We can just as easily fall into the failure mode of entirely privileging long term strategy over short term tactics.

Anarchism is at its very essence anti-fascist, we stand in every way possible at literal opposite pole from nationalism, statism, and traditionalism. Everything anarchists do in pursuit of anarchy is thus in the ultimate sense “antifascist.” But let’s not get lost in the hyperopia of “my poly vegan intersectional open-source bike coop is building an ‘anti-fascist’ world” and fail to see to the neonazi barbarians presently at the gates.

Boycotting

It’s been said endlessly by those of us who’ve paid attention to them over the years but the vast majority of what antifa does isn’t oriented towards street fighting but leveraging social pressure to get fascists boycotted. Nazi band tries to play a bar, and antifacists will notify the bar owner, delivering evidence of the band’s politics. If the bar owner doesn’t care then they’ll publicize that and rally public pressure until the bar owner fears being boycotted. It’s frankly hard to imagine how anyone would have any sort of issue with this kind of activism, but in reality people are incredibly averse to conflict and take challenges to people’s social standing far more seriously than nazis murdering people.

People in general don’t give a shit about ethics or anyone besides themselves. So when someone says, “hey the band you like isn’t just aping fascist aesthetics and being edgy, they’ve also donated thousands to fascist orgs and have let nazis recruit at their shows,” a lot of people’s first response isn’t “oh my god, that sucks, thanks for giving me a heads up!” but to instead spin out in hysterics over who the Thought Police will be coming for next and how dare anyone expect anything from you, that’s The Real Fascism. It’s a startling lack of compassion for the targets of fascism and a myopic concern with any remotely distant likelihood you might yourself be inconvenienced. Sure the band may be facilitating gangs of nazi thugs beating immigrants on the street, but the REAL issue at hand is that some folks might respect you less for going to their shows.

It’s a kind of egotistical nihilism that is common in scenes like punk and metal. Caring about other people or shit in the wider world is whatever, but the fires of hell must be unleashed if someone’s “moralism” runs the risk of even slightly negatively affecting you. When the alt-right declares that they’re the punk rock of today, there’s actually a solid case to be made that they’re right. Or at least they represent the unbroken continuation of a nihilist current always within such scenes. Shitbags like Jim Goad that decades ago published punk zines calling for women to be raped and beaten are now leading figures among the modern fascist milieu. Indeed the antifa vs. nihilist shitbag split over fascist bands is pretty much exactly replicated when it comes to issues like long standing rapists being called out in the punk scene. A hell of a lot of people don’t even bother to read the evidence and testimonials but immediately start screaming about “Witch Hunts!” because whether or not the dude raped someone or the band is fascist is totally irrelevant to them, what they’re most concerned about is the establishment of social consequences for it.

Libertarians have been shouting for years that boycott is the ethical approach, that organized boycotts could have suppressed the horrors of Jim Crow without involving the state. But now that folks have actually come face to face with organized boycotts and the social pressure that underpins them many are horrified. “Social pressure!? Sanctioning those who don’t sanction?! That way lies mean kids in high school. I just meant if you don’t like something you should shut up about it and maybe not purchase it, don’t ever preach about it or judge others’ purchasing habits.”

It’s a sad reality that whole point to libertarianism for many is a simplistic elitism and amoralism. A code of rules (property rights) that one can blindly adhere to without much cognitive overhead and then ignore all other ethical considerations or complications. The modern core libertarian demographic is infamously slightly intellectual white boys – who in their worst moments just want to dwell in the protective simplicities of their privilege and ignore the pleas of those oppressed in complex and challenging ways. “Patriarchy! Hah! What nonsense. No, I’m not going to listen to an explanation longer than can fit in a brief youtube video. Look, honey, I respect property rights and don’t need to pay attention to anything else, it’ll sort itself out. And if it doesn’t then you were wrong to whine about it.”

Of course many actual libertarians have known better – just as many if not arguably more are drawn to libertarianism by sincere empathy for victims of war or the police state. And smarter figures recognize that “the market” is inherently inclusive of activism around cultural changes. Organized boycotts are as important to the growth of a healthy market just as much as investments, and social justice style activism is just another rational form of market participation that can build a healthier world.

I just want to briefly point out that opposing boycotts is profoundly non-libertarian and anti-market. To oppose the organizing of boycotts is to oppose to the flow and processing of information. If someone frequents a racist establishment that says something about their character. To not integrate that into your own evaluations of who you want to associate with requires a deliberate act of ignorance, of intellectual self-sabotage. The entire justification for markets is supposed to be that they’re effective at transmitting information and thus providing greater agency. What opponents of boycotts want is the curtailing of what information can be transmitted on the market. Or, if we’re being more honest, what they secretly always wanted was a world where they wouldn’t have to consider issues of ethics and values, where pertinent information in those issues is never transmitted or acted upon. Fuck that.

Now of course there is a second direction of critique. One could argue that boycotts and other choices of exclusion or ostracism raise barriers in the same way that borders do. This is a transparently bad faith critique when it comes from people who themselves advocate draconian state-enforced borders, but there are a spattering of actual anarchists concerned that boycotts violate the spirit of openness and connection that anarchism aspires to. Isn’t boycott “exclusionary”?

I’ll absolutely admit that boycotts sever connectivity in specific ways and even sever connectivity on the whole. But the tactic of boycotting can also be applied in ways that increase overall connectivity in a network by impeding the connection of a malicious or faulty nodes. A router forwarding packets on a network may keep a record of how honest or effective other routers are in forwarding the packets it sends, and it may update who it thus forwards packets to. Indeed routers can receive information from other routers alerting them to badly performing routers. This strategy actually enables greater overall connectivity.

As an anarchist, I am a consequentialist, not a deontologist. I’m not interested in constructing some mirror of the clumsy rules for behavior that the state imposes as law. I’m interested in achieving the goal of freedom through whatever means are efficient and coherent enough to actually reach it. While I want a world of peace, sometimes violence like resisting the Stasi is necessary to achieve that ends. Similarly while I want a world of connection, some limited disassociation can be necessary to achieve that ends.

Racism is a specific form of boycott. But racism is an irrational and counterproductive severing of connectivity, whereas boycotts of racists is a severing of connectivity to nodes that impede connectivity. Boycotting racists is about routing around damaged nodes, limiting the extent to which they can damage us all, the same way that the internet increases connectivity by routing around nodes that impede connectivity.

Refusing to give fascists the prestige of a podium is exactly the same as refusing to give Flat Earthers the prestige of a podium. Science would be utterly crippled if every wackadoodle was allowed into scientific conferences, much less given a platform at them. There’s simply not enough time to address every wingnut, nor should we. Keeping pseudoscientific con-men out of scientific prestige is a matter of severing connections, of choosing disassociation, so as to make the whole enterprise more efficient at spreading knowledge. Someone’s record of honesty constitutes meta-information that shouldn’t be censored or suppressed, but accurately spread. One way we spread that is by denying the prestige of platform to people who have a history of fraud. To enforce a regime where Flat Earthers are obliged a spot on any geology panel is to forcibly suppress the meta-information that such symbols of legitimacy like a podium otherwise convey.

Note just how dramatically different this from national borders. Boycotts emerge from the distributed decisions of individuals, national borders are imposed by monopolistic collectivist entities in ways that inherently suppress the agency of the complex array of people they somehow claim to represent or speak for.

Libertarians should ostensibly know better than this since the very fucking justification of the market is supposed to rest on the premise that collective bodies like “nations” or even “tribes” can’t conceivably make efficient decisions. Individuals know better the particulars they face than can ever be conveyed in a committee. Agency, calculation, consideration doesn’t take place in the head of some abstract “committee” but in the actual brains of its constituent individuals. Individual brains are infinitely more tightly and efficiently networked than any social organism can be through mere human communication – a choice in your head is can be an immediate calculation involving billions of neurons, no comparable processing happens anywhere else. This is why only individuals constitute agents in any real sense. When people form a committee they don’t magically create some kind of supervening “agent” in any ethically relevant way. And that’s certainly not true when it comes to laughable mythical entities like “races.”

Because individuals are the site of agency, top-down edicts about association necessarily cut agency. Thankfully antifascist activism is a perfect example of bottom-up or horizontally organized boycotting. A means for people to network together and work as individuals to make the world a better place. Each node evaluating not just the faulty node but the evaluations made by other nodes in response to the faulty node. …Provided of course that you actually don’t want nazis recruiting and making money at your local bar, and you actually care about whether people likewise have anti-nazi values.

Doxing

As a staunch proponent of free speech (ie freedom of information) I have the hardest time fathoming how someone could object to doxing nazis. Once again you’d fucking think that libertarians at least would be pro more accurate information being available to inform market decisions. “Oh? This fellow applying to work for me is a nazi with a history of calling for ethnic cleansing? Well I certainly don’t want to contribute to his daily bread, much less hangout with such a would-be genocidaire.”

Surely whether someone has raped, stolen, etc, is relevant metadata about them you’d want to know before interacting with them! And surely disseminating that metadata in ways accessible to those likely to interact with them is as basic a social service as you could ask for. Mailing neighbors of a nazi organizer to let them know about his activism, or equivalently putting his information online, seems to me as unimpeachable an action as one could take.

But then folks have gotten really weird about privacy in the last decade. In reaction to the surveillance state truly horrible notions of privacy have become cancerous in our society. See for example the European Union broadly backing and attempting to impose the hyper-authoritarian “right to be forgotten.” You want to talk about attempts to control one’s thoughts or limit free speech?! The notion that someone has a right to delete or censor the information held by someone else is how we get monstrous atrocities like intellectual property.

While the capricious and violent behemoth of the state changes some situational calculations – creating an ethical obligation to avoid spreading true information that will get someone imprisoned when the damage they’d do otherwise is below that – as an overwhelming rule our every instinct should be towards spreading truthful information.

If you’re opposed to doxing nazis then you’d be opposed to survivors naming and exposing their rapists. I literally can’t think of a more damning reductio then that. What in the fuck was the whole fight for the internet and freedom of information even FOR if it wasn’t to provide people with more accurate information on abuse and leave less hiding room for monsters?

No one has a right to erase reality, to hide from past harm, to silence survivors, and memory hole actual facts. If a less than ideal society over-judges that individual then the better solution in general is to correct that with more truthful information, not to fucking hide it. We should err on the side of freedom except in extreme situations (snitching to the state, outing queer folk in homophobic societies, etc), and protecting literal nazi organizers is certainly not one. One can see suspending a general obligation towards freedom of information to save a random anarchist organizer for reasons of consequences — their activism would be curtailed, etc. There are no comparable negative consequences to leaking the info of nazis.

If the concern is that outing someone as a nazi organizer has a very small chance of bringing vigilante violence down upon them, well 1) antifascists are the ones that get literally shot or bombed when doxed, I know of literally no case when fascists have been killed as a result of doxing and 2) oh for the love of – why should anyone care about nazi organizers getting beat up?

Violent Disruption of Fascist Organizing

Alright, let’s have at it.

Organizing is not merely speech. No antifascist group that I’m aware of advocates the punching or doxing of random racist grandpas. The issue is when people organize towards fascist means. When they come together and act or recruit explicitly to accomplish the fucking horrific goal of ethnic cleansing and turning our society into an absolute prison.

We can surely all agree that it’s totally okay for the anarchists currently fighting ISIS in Syria to use preemptive force, to initiate individual battles rather than always waiting for that fascistic enemy to fire first.

Why is this ethically okay? 1) Our general ethical inclination towards non-aggression is just a rough heuristic that breaks down in some circumstances, it’s not an immortal axiom. 2) “Non-aggression” is poorly defined outside the space of really obvious immediate threats. 3) If we heed to immediatist notions of aggression we will get killed, because it allows the concealment of the gun until the very last second.

The notion some NAPist libertarians have of non-aggression is wildly naive about actual violent conflict. “We’ll all sit here while the fascists assemble outside our house with guns, and then wait until the very last second to try and outrace them on the quickdraw.” That shit’s insane. You will not win a war on such terms. And while libertarian extreme reticence to think in terms of war is in some sense admirable, it opens a catastrophic weakness. And if you steel wall yourself on all fronts but one your enemy is going to happily choose to fight you in the one direction you’re weak.

It’s absolutely true that we should endeavor to avoid outright war or full-scale civil conflict as much as conceivably possible. The baby gets split, no one wins, the death toll is unimaginable. I absolutely do not want a civil war, or even two insurgencies – anarchist and nazi – fighting each other. But if we prove ourselves weak in that arena, if we signal to fascists that our hands are tied, that we will only ever belatedly defend ourselves, rather than be smart enough to sometimes throw punches first, we will make such a conflict absolutely inevitable. If we make ourselves impenetrable on the discourse and culture front but hesitant on the physical force front we will have painted them into a corner where the only option for them is physical force. Right now they’re throwing up a lot of disingenuous flak to give them cover to organize a fighting force, but their rampant lying and bullshit arguments are hopefully going to catch up with them. If we let them build an army while they have this cover, without smashing them up, or play a purely defensive game, we will get obliterated. They don’t jump you when you’ve five friends armed to the teeth, they jump you when you’re alone in an alley, or bomb your house when you’re asleep. This is shit neonazis already do. The myopic inability of non-aggression to see wider context simply won’t cut it in such conflict.

There’s a kind of panic that I’ve seen in folks when forced to face up to this reality. The classic move is to embrace a high-horse fatalism – “well okay, we’ll all die, but I’ll die with my soul intact.” This is especially strong with libertarians who see consequentialism as the literal devil, and any concession to it as opening the door to statism. A rich philosophical dive seems beyond the scope of this essay but I want to emphasize that a consequentialism with freedom as its end cannot replicate the state unless you completely discard all intelligence about means. The basic anti-statist insight is that giant monopolies on violence cannot be constrained or limited, if allowed to exist their tyranny will grow. That’s still inescapable for the serious consequentialist. But justifying people’s militias or individuals firing first on ISIS does not fucking imply constructing a singular institution with a monopoly on violence. There are feedbacking tendencies in the language and psychology of “war” that can definitely lead to reactive violent tribalism and the construction of states, but “war” is not a singular unified simple thing. The insight from it that if you’re in WWII you should probably shoot someone with a swastika armband coming toward you before they formally shoot first is a fucking good one.

So why the fuck should we not consider ourselves at war with fascists when they consider themselves at war with us and are actively killing people? Why are neonazis any fucking different from ISIS?

Nazis absolutely intend to kill us all. The ethnonationalist agenda is one of genocide, since forced deportation would not and has never been passively ceded to, and they all have moments where they admit this. Extermination of anarchists is the number one agenda of every authoritarian nationalist state in history, of any ideological pretense, from Hitler to Stalin. And in any case the imposition of fascist rule on the survivors would be pretty near to death, given the ways it would systematically and totally suppress individual agency.

Sure the liberals and conservatives are also statists and inclined to authoritarianism. Although there is at least a rather large difference in scale of the democide explicitly laid out in their aspirations. But I’m happy to accept the expansion of the set of people we could say are pursuing mass murder. No anarchist on earth would condemn someone punching Cheney, Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. And it would surely be okay to preemptively kill the demagogues urging genocide over the radio in Rwanda. How on earth was Bill Kristol’s role in the lead up to Iraq any different from them? While I think preemptive violence should be narrowly accepted, I happily bite the bullet that this could extend to genocidal politicos in liberal democracies or say Marxist-Leninists’ hungering for purges. Better to bite that philosophical bullet than inevitably receive their actual bullets. I’m not saying that anarchists randomly spraying bullets at members of the political establishment would be strategic (I don’t think it would be), just that it wouldn’t be inherently unethical.

The strategic point is an important one, and worthy of complex analysis. Obviously no one’s going around executing nazi organizers and street thugs, and it would probably be a bad move for people to start that. A good number of antifa rallies don’t actually involve punching nazis, and fewer involve punching first. Optics and the complexities of the Trump-era situations where undercover nazis have been using republicans as a shield are non-trivial and antifa activists clearly recognize this. There’s been quite a variety of strategic thought I’ve seen expressed and debated on antifa sites. We can have a good faith argument about strategy, what we shouldn’t waste time on is pretending that Richard Spencer is categorically different from an ISIS recruiter in any ethically profound way.

And yes, although there are splits and different functional internal organs, the fascist movement is interconnected as a single entity waging war on us. Why should we give that much of a shit whether Vanguard America formally claims James Alex Fields (the murderer of Heather Heyer) as a member? Why place such weight upon arbitrary organizational pretenses? Fields hung and collaborated with them, and they shared the same goals.

When the Earth Liberation Front burned down logging trucks, the “ELF Press Office” was a legally distinct above the ground entity ostensibly not in personal collaboration with the ELF cells doing the property destruction. That may have rightfully protected Craig Rosebraugh and Leslie James Pickering from some measure of legal retaliation — we would be in an absolutely horrid place if we happily allowed the state to prosecute publishing and defending a terrorist group as “functional collaboration” – but on an actual ethical analysis rather than legal one, of fucking course Craig and Leslie were functioning as organs in a larger ELF organism. The same way that some military administrators function as organs in the larger military. Or Richard Spencer functions as an organ within the larger fascist movement. Obviously the ELF was a hell of a lot better in goals and means than the US military or the fascist movement, but it’s not like we’d try to make some kind of profound ethical (rather than legal) distinction between Craig’s participation in the ELF and those of the cell members physically vandalizing the logging trucks.

Today, in a different direction, the mexican terrorist nihilist group “Individuals Tending Towards Savagery” happily adopts endless different names, seemingly had different internal splits, etc, but they’re still functionally the same cluster of people.

The network of collaboration and crossover between outright fascist / white nationalist groups is well documented. What arbitrary totemic titles they happen to assign to random sub-clumpings of their ranks is really quite irrelevant. Organizations aren’t magically real entities – they’re just people happening to call themselves something. And getting drawn too much into taking that shit seriously will make us easy to run rings around. Just fucking read the Milo expose, that motherfucker was happily collaborating with piles of nazis and extreme reactionaries while pretending there was a distance there absolutely wasn’t. The same gets revealed constantly of everyone else in the fascist movement.

“Okay, but what about strategy? Surely punching people is a bad strategy. It’ll just make nazis doubledown with victim complexes and meanwhile lose public support.”

While sure, a population pickled in liberal democracy is going to recoil reflexively at acts of violence that aren’t super over-the-top clear cut defensive and proportional, there’s good evidence that repression does not have the same “doubling down” effect on fascists as it can have on others. Over decades of struggle antifascist activists from a variety of backgrounds and in a variety of contexts have converged on the same general conclusion.

It’s important to understand that fascist psychology and the mechanisms of their recruitment are different than anarchists or even liberals.

The primary recruitment tool of the fascist is the appearance of power.

This is why fascists — and those other self-aware authoritarians in their general orbit including Stalinists and Maoists — focus so strongly on aesthetics and rituals that reinforce perceptions of broad popularity, community, strength-by-association and general social standing. Those movements that only whine, offering victimization narratives and promises of power without any tangible content to them, rarely recruit any lasting base of self-aware authoritarians (although a few will surreptitiously set up shop to prey upon the few true believers and deadenders). Appearance of strength and legitimacy is everything, without it fascist movements dry up. No self-aware authoritarian wants to back a loser cause.

This is why refusing fascists the legitimization of a platform and violently countering their rallies has worked so well historically. The authoritarian base that fascists recruit from, don’t share the instincts of proponents of liberty, they aren’t attracted to underdogs with no hope, they aren’t compelled to self-sacrifice in defense of the weak, they’re attracted to supermen on the rise. When a nazi gets up on a stage to call for genocide his arguments don’t matter, it’s the potency of the act, the very fact that he was able to get on that stage and say such things in the first place, that recruits. [source]

Some people really do only respect physical force. The most quintessential examples of such people are fascists.

On The Specific Connection Between The Alt-Right and the NAP

There’s a good faith argument that can be made that the youtube alt-right recruits differently than the neonazis of prior decades – appealing to whiny beta-males for whom a tissue thin pretense of moral high ground is more relevant than the power fantasy being sold, and thus the beatdowns that worked so well against boneheads may only inspire more “see the globalists are soooo unfaiiiiir” reaction from losers who hunger for power but are more desperate for any sort of identity, cause or belonging. Myopic notions of what constitutes formal aggression may be unreflective of how the wider populace views things, but still indeed have some particular resonance with former libertarians.

It’s depressing seeing how many modern alt-right folks come from libertarian origins and try to weld fascist ideology onto a shallow Ron Paul-esque politic. “I’m not an authoritarian so I’m not a fascist, I’m a typical libertarian, I just believe magical collective entities of nationstates should violently stop the free association of individuals.” But since libertarians opened the fucking door to this horrorshow there is some argument that they’re better equipped to disrupt the blatantly contradictory ideological gymnastics underpinning it. Yet there’s also a case to be made that libertarians had their fucking chance, and for decades let in racist after racist, reactionary after reactionary from Rothbard to Ron Paul to Lew Rockwell to Hoppe, and now half the libertarian orgs have been taken over by fascists like the Mises Institute (openly championing “blood and soil”) and the other half are barely fighting off the cancer. They’ve had decades to stop this in their communities and they failed miserably the entire way, so maybe their advice is of little fucking import at this point.

I’m somewhat split between these takes. I think libertarians can and should play a great role in undermining the alt-right, and probably have some useful insights to the unique psychology and twisted ideology of the alt-right youtube/chan kids. But it also seems clear that they haven’t been making much headway, and the differences between the /pol/ losers of today and the skinhead losers of the 80s are perhaps overblown. A greater affinity for the pretenses of performative “intellectual debate” online perhaps, but the same underlying reactionary psychology.

How much does it matter that ethno-nationalist youtubers like Stefan Molyneux initially recruited their base from “libertarians”?

The Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left have been in these fights for a decade. Most of the major nazis in this crop of the alt-right have origin stories in denouncing us / getting pushed out of libertarianism by us. Because we’re a nerdy think tank we’ve stuck to countering their ideas, critiquing them, deconverting their followers, entirely in the realm of words. And we have had some success.

But what has been abundantly clear over the years is their opportunism and lack of any ethical compass. Molyneux went ethno-nationalist basically because he realized anarchists weren’t going to support his using DMCA and the state to bully a critic, so he pretty openly pivoted to a new audience that would pay his bills. Christopher “crying nazi” Cantwell basically did the same as he realized libertarianism wasn’t a path to personal power. A similar story with the folks behind The Right Stuff, etc, etc. These people, for all their pretenses of being champions of reason and debate, are obviously attracted to power, and so too does this seem to be the case for a good fraction of their audience. This strongly implies that whatever other victim narrative anti-sjw garbage they tap into if you stop the alt-right from being able to generate spectacles of power and you’ll at least dry up most of the power-hungry opportunist fraction of them.

Deontology and the Charge of Hypocrisy

People with ethical systems focused on categorizing actions in isolation rather than on strategic pursuit of goals have a nasty tendency to drop accusations of hypocrisy:  “If you’re okay with punching nazis in pursuit of a freer world then you have no capacity to object to nazis punching anarchists in pursuit of a more hierarchical world.”

This maneuver is annoying as hell. Of course non-anarchists could use the reasoning I’m using here to justify all manner of things including exterminating anarchists if you utterly remove the core values/goals I’m following. As a consequentialist I’m not trying to set up some kind of value-independent framework of play that I think should be established universally, some kind of rules of conduct between ideologies.

Anarchists want freedom for all, fascists want their nightmarish dystopia of domination and a fractured humanity sliced apart and imprisoned in suffocatingly static tribes. There can be no pretense of tolerance between such wildly varying values and goals. It’s not like fascists and anarchists can “agree to disagree” or politely reach some kind of civil detente. Our utility functions are utterly opposed and incompatible on every level.

Thus there’s no point in pretending that there could ever be some kind of “fair” rules by which we should hold each other to in our conflict. I’m not going to feign shock and betrayal when they march us off to the extermination camps or just lie like crazy on twitter – although of course I will point out both. And there is no equivocation between them punching or doxing us and us doing so to them. The act isn’t the fucking relevant category, the goal is.

Fascists are gonna do what fascists do, which is try to kill all proponents of freedom. And anarchists should do whatever is most effective in building a freer world.

In some very strong sense this ties our hands, because for example imprisoning all reactionaries in gulags would clearly not be a sustainable or coherent step towards a freer world. You can’t jail or massacre people into freedom. Not that that evil scumbag Marx was ever truly interested in freedom as anarchists called out from the start, but even his pretense of a “transitory dictatorship” is obviously a means that will never ever lead to the ends of freedom.

Yet pure saintly pacifism isn’t an option either. To stem the overall blood flow sometimes, in rare, extreme, isolated situations you have to get a little bit of blood on your hands. The path to a better world isn’t just going to be the slow evolutionary building of better cultures and norms, of winning arguments and persuasion. It will sometimes on the fringe involve shit like throwing a punch before a nazi thug can. Proving to them in a language they understand that there will be fucking consequences to their horrific game so at least a fraction of self-interested little sociopathic shits go home.

There are dangers here – of course — but there are greater dangers in tying our hands entirely to some kind of overly simplistic code.

The liberal attempt to create value-independent rules for behavior is just fucking naive as shit. As if nazis can live in peace with anyone. That shit is a comforting delusion that will get us all killed.

There’s a historical anecdote I love about the President of the Spanish Republic on the dawn of the Spanish Civil War. He wakes late and goes into his office only to be irked to discover there’s no coffee or breakfast waiting for him. But no matter, he calls his Minister of Finance to resolve a problem they’d been working on the other day and gets no response on the other end. So he calls another Minster. No response. Another minister and another department. Down the line. No one picks up. Finally he storms out only to discover his palace is empty. No receptionists at all. And as he wanders into the streets crowds of armed workers hurriedly pass him by with little notice. The fascists have launched a war and the anarchists have mobilized most everyone in response. The liberal government — the insane pretense of an ordered peace between irreconcilable values of oppression and freedom — is de facto dissolved, and the President was the last person to discover this.

The assumptions of liberal democracy have been suffocating us all since birth, but there is no treaty possible with fascists. No code that if we hold ourselves to we can expect them to hold themselves to. We must remember this, or end up wandering stunned like that Spanish president. This isn’t some conflict between tribes or muddied political positions, this is a conflict between utterly opposite and purified ethical values. What matters is our goal of freedom for all, our tactics should be evaluated in their efficiency in reaching that — not as commentary on what we’re cool with fascists also doing.

Constructive Critical Thoughts on Antifa and The Present Situation

Antifa was basically formed to solve a pressing problem in the short term through direct action. It has never pretended to offer a long-term solution — any more than street medics at protests might be critiqued for not offering a long-term solution to the health care crisis or police brutality. This in no remote way detracts from the importance of such work. Yet it does ultimately mean there’s boundary conditions to the utility of their traditional work, or wider issues to be addressed. And as antifascism has risen to prominence so has this been greeted with howls from longstanding activists in other arenas, each with their own off-the-cuff prescription for how antifascist work should be subsumed under their preferred institutional or strategic approach.

It’s a lot like some activist version of a youth pastor telling kids “Hey I know you kids like antifa, but did you know that the REAL antifascism is getting people signed up to their local union?” There’s a fucking cavalcade of such “advice” from opportunist radicals.

“Antifa” groups have suddenly gone from marginalized janitors of the anarchist movement without social capital to high-respect activism, and everyone has jumped in to declare themselves antifa and also try to dictate what antifa should be, or throw out the most poorly formed criticism. This is a major reason I feel trepidation wading into this debate — everyone with any social capital suddenly is an expert on antifa and wants to declare themselves an antifascist thought leader. Although just as an anarchist present in the anarchist milieu I’ve occasionally read and talked with antifascists for well over a decade my experience is fundamentally limited and I don’t mean to appropriate the mantle of “antifa” for myself.

However.

While I may be nothing more than the peanut gallery on this, I do have some analysis and perhaps constructive criticisms. My two biggest points are, admittedly rather obvious: 1) that antifascist practice was not remotely developed to best win a propaganda or meme war, and 2) the creeping generalization of “antifascism” into a nebulous pan-leftist movement to push for left tribe versus right tribe is profoundly dangerous and unstrategic.

The Alt-Right was basically formed to expand overton window and win the propaganda war to epistemically isolate and radicalize a large fraction of the population. Antifa was formed to kick fascist thugs off the streets and impede their capacity to organize. Both are succeeding at what they’re good at. Antifa is often winning on the streets and losing on youtube, which is far better than losing on both fronts, but is still ceding a couple million kids on youtube to increasingly frothing and misled hyperreaction. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting the opposite arrangement would be better. Anything that limits their capacity to organize and intimidate in meatspace saves lives. But it’s worth noting how completely asymmetric these movements are:

Antifa groups have stuck to journalism and the studious documentation of facts. Conversely, the Alt-Right has tried to spread as many lies as possible to muddy the waters and win narrative / partisan ratchet games. You don’t need information theory to know which approach has the edge — almost no one commenting on “antifa” even knows they have websites documenting nazis, but millions have seen memes misrepresenting antifa’s capture of ISIS territory in Syria as somehow antifa being in league with ISIS.

Antifa have largely stuck to small discrete secretive formal organizations created by anarchists to fight neonazi gangs. Conversely, the Alt-Right is a soup without much formal organization and what formal organizations there are are less secretive. One of the left’s true talents is in organizing, and secrecy has obviously allowed them to continue working without all getting executed by nazis. But at the same time the formality associated with traditional activist security culture can be constraining in other ways, creating inside-outside hierarchies where small circles of people dictate how information flows and give de facto marching orders to those outside.

Additionally, since antifa are overwhelmingly anarchists they’ve recruited primarily through the meatspace anarchist community/movement. The anarchist milieu is far more of a closed or richly tied network than the Alt Right. We live together, we work together. This closeness in many dimensions has historically provided a kind of solidity that at least to some degree impedes infection. We’re able to enforce certain norms, culture, politics, etc. This has all kinds of dangers and downsides as well as upsides. The alt-right, despite the neoreactionary fetish for “community” has absolutely nothing comparable. And so we’re fighting a truly bizarre war where the explicit fascists are utilizing perhaps more anarchist or at least fluid means — amorphous networks, anonymity, swarm tactics — against an anarchist movement that has retreated to solidity, clear boundaries, highly tied community, etc. What they pine loudly for — identity, belonging, community, solidity — is what we already have (and have discovered the downsides to). At the same time they are leveraging what should be our advantages.

On the one hand antifascist professionalism is valorous and part of a commitment to truth that the alt-right happily discards in favor of postmodern trolling and social positioning. I’m not challenging the value of antifascist groups doing their research meticulously, nor am I challenging the formal organizing or at least structure that often requires. I still think the sheer intractability of reality means our commitment to truth will ultimately bend things in our favor and I think a rush to embrace the means of the Alt Right — dishonest polarizing misinformation — would absolutely doom us all.

But on the other hand it’s very clear that our obsession with community — a need that many have long noted drives the majority of the activist milieu far more than actually changing the world — has turned us inward. And here by “us” I mean not just anarchists but nearly everyone in the left or post-left or “social justice” or whatever.

Why does the very idea of caring what the general public thinks or trying to persuade them sound utterly perplexing and alien? Because we’ve given up on them, our selfish hunger for the monkey brain needs of community and belonging has slowly warped anarchism into a site of retreat, not attack. Anarchism has become a hideout from the problematic world, rather than a launchpad for grappling with it. The warm blanket embrace of a community with actual ethical values and behavioral norms that don’t kick the lowest has so entirely colonized our reward mechanisms that we have turned inward. We focus on policing our community rather than persuading outsiders.

Don’t get me wrong there is absofuckinglutely a place for holding one another accountable and drawing lines, I’m not saying we should tolerate abuse out of some kumbaya “why can’t you make nice with your rapist” garbage, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold absolute lines against the creep of horrific politics like tankies, nazis and eco-extremists like ITS. We do need some kind of base from which to move the world, and a place to retreat to when need be. But the alt-right actually has something that anarchists have largely lost — a sense of possibility. The world seems pregnant to them, a place where their wild dreams can actually happen. And thus they’re out there searching for any possible avenue To Change Everything. We’ve largely forgotten how to do that. So while the alt-right is naive and stupid as fuck they’re still throwing everything on the wall to see what sticks. When was the last time anarchists did anything new?

The black bloc, for example, has become a hollow echo of a hollow echo, a signifier warped by the mythologization by a half dozen radical generations. Anarchism has become drenched in convention and obligation. A whole lotta tumblr-generation kids only bloc up because they see it as a necessary ritual for community belonging. Where the bloc once had innovative security culture when everyone was making things up for the first time, that knowledge has been casually discarded. Things like Pastel Bloc demonstrate just how profoundly the bloc has been reduced to ritual in the service of community rather than tool in the service of accomplishing shit.

I am not trying to be a mean crabby old anarchist here lecturing kids about the proper respect of lawns, there is a value to community building and I appreciated Pastel Bloc’s aesthetic game just like everyone else, but I want some level of explicitness on the asymmetries at play. Our strengths, our weaknesses, and the things we’ve perhaps unfortunately given up.

And I also want to warn that if antifascist organizing has a too formalized and insular failure mode, it also has a “too expansive” failure mode.

As folks previously not involved in antifa work have rushed in to champion the term there’s been a push towards broadening antifa as a broad leftist coalition or movement building. I’m deeply disquieted about this approach, both in that I find it unstrategic and dangerous to try and broaden the goals of antifascism and that as an anarchist I consider “left unity” a trap. Anarchists have nothing in common with authoritarian communists, they have been our enemies from the start. Granted, a lot of established antifa have spoken out loudly against such, but still, the situation is dangerous.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: Anarchists must clearly and publicly oppose communist authoritarianism. Antifa cannot be (and thankfully is not) quiet when it comes to denouncing those who fetishize some of the most heinous states in human history because they made some perfunctory noises about freeing the working class. Further the sort of monsters who diminish and defend genocides committed by communist regimes must have their organizing and entryism exposed and resisted just as we do for fascists. If this is not to be done under the label of “antifa” specifically, then as many anarchists have suggested, anti-tankie action groups should also be formed. Failing to be strong and morally consistent on this allows fascists and their allies to cloak their work under the guise of standing up to authoritarian communism (and equivocating between the horrors of Leninists and those like anarcho-communists that died fighting them). Those “anti-communist action” shirts sold by fascists that fetishize the tyrannical Pinochet regime’s murder by helicopter of dissidents have been effective at ratcheting up an authoritarian creep whereby right and left authoritarians pretend to be the only viable response to the other.

Yes, it will take many things to stop fascism, broadly defined, but there is immense strategic utility in having antifascist activism remain very specific and relatively tightly defined. When left-liberals on twitter say “wanting universal healthcare or student debt forgiveness is antifascism” they do an immense disservice to the cause of antifascism. Fascism constitutes a very distinct and specific danger; there are many other dangers or objectionable things in this world. Muddying the waters — casting antifascism as a left v right struggle (Now With Streetfights!) directly plays into the hands of those fascists trying desperately to pull the rest of the right into embracing outright fascism. Yes of course the neoliberal surveillance state constitutes an immense threat, as does neoconservative imperial conquest. But these are distinct things that function differently and must be tackled differently. The small pleasure you get out of rhetorically being able to slander your other enemies with the “fascist” label is sometimes simply not worth it.

These criticisms may seem in broad conflict — on the one hand I think that antifa has stumbled because waging a war for the soul of our society teetering on the brink of outright authoritarianism through a partisan electoral conflict is well beyond its purview and expertise — on the other hand I’m deeply worried about antifa being subsumed and appropriated as a rallying cry to unify and mobilize the left as a movement. But I think that there’s a relatively straightforward path that avoids this pitfalls.

Formal antifa groups should stay focused and precise — folks need to make it absolutely impossible for the centrist media to conflate an anti-trump rally and antifascist groups. The question of how to respond to Trump has tortured antifa writers since he entered the primary. My view is that whether Trump’s authoritarianism and his most fervent base is formally fascist is academic and irrelevant. Peeling the self-aware fascists entryists from the 60 million Trump voters is an existential issue. We literally all die if we fail on that front.

An actual civil war will not go the way the nazis and broader bloodthirsty GOP dumbasses think, but both sides will lose profoundly in a civil conflict. The “come at me bro” right has no fucking idea what it would actually be getting into or the extent of support, resources, skills, and indomitability that leftists, anarchists and even many liberals would actually tap. In part because of the right’s self-chosen isolation from anyone to the left of Limbaugh. But the baby would get cut in half. Most likely some centrist technocratic vestige of the state apparatus would emerge the blood-soaked tyrannical victor. There is no future down that path where what is won is worth the victory. We must make preparations, of course, no one is saying anarchists should give up their guns or stop training, but ideally the goal should be to prepare precisely in order to avoid such a drawn out conflict.

Don’t get me wrong, if we are to see a better world there will inevitably arise moments where violence is necessary. Where politicians are dragged kicking and screaming from their positions of power lest they otherwise destroy the world to retain their rule. But violent conflict is not a goal into itself, it must be tempered by diligent strategy and ethics. The cheap comforts of collective team rallying are not worth the long term damage that can arise from their misuse.

In my view we need two fronts: we need a political anarchism augmented by a broader anti-authoritarianism (with milder goals like the abolition of prisons, borders and cops) that goes out and finds any conceivable way to convert seven billion people to anarchism within two decades, that builds a stigmergic mass movement and the resilient decentralized infrastructure for serious resistance. And we need a second front that sticks exclusively and pragmatically to the explicit fascist cancer lest it metastasize — doing precisely what antifa groups have always done research, expose, organize against and meet head on. This second front needs to do things like work with the GOP or libertarians or furries or whatever to peel nazi entryists away from them. It must be incredibly pragmatic and precise. Less interested in how pure our own community is than what we can do to limit damage in the world.

Although of course, part of pragmatism is recognizing the limits to one’s capacity to alter or direct the reactions of millions outraged at our country’s slide into fascism and with a limited vocabulary to express that outrage.

I’m less clear on how to navigate the issues of collective representation and narrative crafting. Right now antifa groups will release absolutely devastating exposes… and at absolute best they’ll get on the order of a hundred or thousand shares on twitter, while alt-right conspiracy nuts will get hundreds of thousands. That sort of marginalization is absolutely unsustainable. Critiques of respectability politics only go so far, if antifascists don’t do more to win the narrative among the wider world of normies and reactionaries – or at least lose it less crushingly – fascist bullshit could get normalized among literally tens of millions, and then we all die.

Sites like It’s Going Down and Anti-Fascist News have started to take up the narrative crafting role – neither as generic anarchists fighting the broader longer term fight nor as highly specific antifa groups doing the triaging, but I’m troubled at points in this melding of very different functions. IGD syndicates from local antifa groups but also pushes generic movement building stuff and non-antifa content in ways that can muddy the waters. These folks do good work, but I wish there was a more clear distinction being broadcast between traditional highly professional antifa groups and the generic “antifascist movement” that everyone wants to build now. And I wish that folks would stop hijacking antifascism for broader causes or to stoke radical or leftist team identity when that framing impedes things like the pragmatic collaboration with the GOP to expel nazis in Minneapolis. More than anything I wish there was some way to get good national-narrative-strategy-minded media teams into older antifa groups, and that the nebulous generic “antifascist movement” beyond these antifa groups was both more focused on fascism and serious about winning the memetic war for hearts and minds among the tens of millions that the nazis are looking to recruit from.

I recognize this shit is complicated and folks are already stepping up in many respects, but I’m just saying I would emphasize the arena of public narrative crafting, as well as trying to draw clear lines around antifascism to make it capable of wider outreach and less boxable into mainstream partisan tensions.

I will say that I admire that as a generic anarchist project Crimethinc has been somewhat cautious about appropriating the mantle of “antifa” from those doing that work before the rest of us cared too much. And I do love NYC Antifa’s twitter presence — snarky, sharp, heavy on evidence, explicitly anarchist, highly narrow-beamed on traditional antifascist work, as well as capable of pushing stories more widely. Near fucking perfect in every way. Absolute shoutout to them.

Challenge to Critics of Antifa

I recognize that no matter how well I make my points here – even if I’m absolutely and obviously right – a good number of people are so deeply and instinctively revolted by the idea of preemptive violence or ever taking the side of some activists subculturally alien to them that they’d far rather live in cognitive dissonance.

Okay!

In Britain before WW2 there were a few liberal-inclined folks who felt strongly about nonaggression and protecting freedom of assembly but who nevertheless recognized that whatever small erosion of liberal norms antifascists might cause the literal fascists were out to abolish them all. So they went to fascist rallies and heckled them and then defended themselves when the nazis inevitably tried to stomp or kill them. They were as a consequence of their reactive stance often far more badly beaten than other antifascists but they claimed their demonstration of the moral high-ground was worth it.

One can of course critique popular antifascist approaches without stepping to and putting your own life on the line. A valid critique remains a valid critique regardless of who voices it. But some critiques would ring louder if those voicing them were demonstrably serious about the threat posed by fascist / white nationalist groups (It would also help many critics if they demonstrated a basic familiarity with actual antifascist activism and groups, although I realize that that apparently seems a bridge too far.).

So my challenge to all of us in the peanut gallery is this: if you sincerely are aghast at the return of fascism / white nationalism and their organizing efforts, if your heart clinches up in fear and outrage, then do what you do feel is allowable to fight them. If the one antifa tactic you object to is the street fighting then form your own antifa (or whatever you want to call it) group that explicitly does all the reporting and boycott organizing without the street fighting. If what you take objection to is folks occasionally throwing the first punch then get your friends together and form a group that shows up to only provide defensive strength. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll come to the same realizations as every other antifascist activist.

But even more importantly if you value freedom at all you should recognize the situation: the state and Trump in particular are of course going to demonize antifascism and use them as a boogeyman to justify vicious and sweeping state repression. Since they can’t settle for identifying a couple people who threw punches in a park they’ll try to repress the hundreds of thousands who identify or speak out broadly as anti-fascists. How everyone protests is impossible to police without making ourselves authoritarian and artificially unified. Remember that the few scuffles and clashes antifascists have been a part of pale in comparison to what was present in the civil rights movement, despite the history being sanitized. There’s space for hoping our voices persuade a few people to stop doing shit we feel is counterproductive, but this impact is ultimately small. Whereas the impact of voices joining in with the state’s narrative of antifascists being terrorists who must be suppressed is far far far more damaging to the cause of liberty.

So I urge incredible caution and at the very least explicit and prominent nuancing when making critiques of antifa. Obviously no libertarian can endorse classifying antifascist activists as terrorists. Obviously no libertarian can endorse police repression against antifascist activists. But libertarians and others sincerely in favor of liberty must be explicit about that every time the subject is brought up. At the very least in the same way that we feel obliged to pair “the North Korean government is horrifically evil” with “war with North Korea would also be horrifically evil.”

Plenty of liberals, libertarians and centrists have tried to retreat to “both sides are bad” framings — but let’s be absolutely clear if the antifascists are bad for trying to suppress the fascists (without even using the government) then any hint of the government repressing antifascists would be far worse.

In the worst possible case antifascists normalize an illiberal culture of college kids shouting at and occasionally punching anyone they find problematic. This would be bad, no doubt, but is completely put to pale by any increase in the power of the police state. Some punchy overblown “SJWs” would be an annoyance, not an existential threat to freedom itself, whereas the necessary expansiveness of a state campaign against “antifas” would be the deathknell of any hope whatsoever.

Yall get that, right?

Even if antifa is technically “wrong” they’re still fundamentally better than almost anyone else around, and suppression of them would set off a nightmare of state repression for all other anarchists and libertarians.

No longstanding antifa groups or activists have called for hate crimes legislation or the cops to enforce tyranny. In fact part of the reason conservatives have called antifa and BLM “terrorist” “hate groups” is precisely because they don’t trust the police state and want to defang it’s power to oppress, not expand or redirect that power.

Any criticism of antifascists should start by lauding that decision.

Despite that bombastic slogan in Berkeley, antifascist struggle has obviously never embraced literally “any means necessary” – after all blowing up the planet is a “means” by which we might stop fascism. Lobbying for hate crimes laws and police power to round up neonazi street thugs would also be a “means” to defeating at least that expression of fascism, but it’s a clearly a both intolerable and implausible one. By even the most uncharitable evaluation antifascists are thus far less authoritarian than your average liberal, since liberals are more than happy to say “there should be a law” or “call the police” in response to these neonazi gangs.

In any case if you would flip over a military recruiter’s table but not a nazi recruiter’s table you’re either inconsistent or wildly naive to the threat of fascist organizations. And if you’re somehow opposed to flipping over a military recruiter’s table then you’re not an anarchist or libertarian in any meaningful or consequential sense.

Mutual Exchange is the Center for a Stateless Society’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. As anarchists, we often try to make visible the myriad of state violence that usually goes unseen: the seemingly inexhaustible source of drone bombings, incarceration, police brutality, migrant detention, and the like, which terrorize individuals and their communities around the globe. Much of our discourse and collaboration is designed to address these issues and strategize ways to directly combat the state. However, as we move forward with the Trump Presidency and an increasingly public and normalized white supremacy in the form of historic ICE raids, Nazi marches, and everything in between, more and more people are recognizing long-standing problems that can’t be reduced to violence on the part of the state alone. Right now, increasingly fed-up people are simply looking for a way to fight back. This change in the American political climate, which harkens back to the more openly violent and divisive 1960s, demands the Center’s attention and urges new debates and explorations surrounding the anarchist response to an authoritarian culture and the increasing organizing of neonazi groups.

It is with that feeling of necessity that we at the Center want to provide a space for various activists, theorists, organizers, and writers to openly discuss the much heated debates surrounding freedom of speech and political violence currently dominating not just anarchist discussions, but the national political conversation as a whole. But unlike the national conversation, we at the Center, as anarchists interested in knowledge-yielding mutual exchange of practical use, aren’t interested in tribal bickering, self-serving equivocation, “gotcha!” arguments, insults, and all the other popular “devalue and dismiss” perversions of political discourse. The contributors to this symposium are expected to really exchange, which means genuinely putting one’s ideas out there and treating your interlocutor and their ideas with the same honesty you hope they treat you and yours with.

Anarchists are, by definition, anti-fascist. They oppose all forms of fascism just as they oppose all forms of statism, domination, and oppression. What’s left to be settled, however, is what our anti-fascist commitment entails in practice. What should our theoretical debates surrounding the nature and danger of fascist ideas imply for our practical strategies for creating the new, anti-fascist world in the shell of the old, fascist one?

More specifically, we need to understand just what fascism is and how it spreads. We need to know why fascism has any appeal at all and how to stem that appeal. We need to see how concepts like freedom of speech figure into anarchist praxis. We need to discuss what free speech is. We need to explore what constitutes mere speech and assembly and what constitutes intentionality and violence. We need to differentiate between self-defense and aggression. We need to seriously interrogate the morality and efficacy of different kinds of political violence. Most importantly, we need internally consistent ethical and strategic insights into replacing fascist ideas with anarchist ones. Failing to clarify these issues could cost us, not only our souls, but any fighting chance for anarchy left in this fragile world.

Throughout the month of November, we will hear from various individuals about the above issues. The Center has hope that a straightforward conversation around these imminently relevant problems can help anarchists in their goals here and now. We leave it to the reader to appraise the diverse perspectives presented in the symposium that follows and individually judge their own appropriate course of action.

Before the exchange kicks off, here are some preliminary texts and resources on the subject matter:

Histories of antifa, fascist entryism, and antifascist responses:

A Brief But Very Informative History of How Fascists Infiltrated Punk and Metal

The Public Face of Antifa

Antifa Worldwide: A Brief History of International Antifascism

Who are the antifa?

        Anarchists Are Killing Neo-Nazis in Greece

Arguments from antifascist activists on strategy:

Rose City Antifa: Frequently Asked Questions

On Fascism

The Divorce of Thought From Deed

After Gainesville, There Are No Excuses Left

Militant Anti-Fascism (book)

Perspectives critical of some mainstream antifascist tactics:

The Seductive Appeal of the Nazi Exception 

        On Punching Nazis

        Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance 

        Thinking Strategically About Free Speech and Violence 

Mixed or outside perspectives on antifascist activism:

Not Your Grandfather’s Antifascism

Punching Natsees (video)

Diverse discourse on free speech more broadly:

Freedom of Speech SEP Entry

Students vs. The State: The True History of the Free Speech Movement

Safe Spaces, Academic Freedom, and the University as a Complex Association

“Human Rights” As Property Rights

The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America

Does the Left Hate Free Speech? (Part One) (video)

Does the Left Hate Free Speech? (Part Two) (video)

Weaponized Sacredness

        On the Paradox of Tolerance

        America At The End of All Hypotheticals

        Should an Armed Nazi Horde Be Permitted to Invade Your Town?

Previously at C4SS:

Responding to Fascist Organizing 

Radical Liberalism: The Soul of Libertarianism

Our Wildly Different Diagnoses Of “Liberalism”

        Debunking the White Ethno-State

        Against the Pull of Simplicity & Disconnect 

        Understanding Richard Spencer’s Holodomor Denial

        Don’t Extend Gang Classification, Abolish It

        Reclaiming the Anti-Fascist Roots of Libertarianism

The Mutual Exchange

1. Antifa as the Truest Defenders of Free Speech – William Gillis
2. Holding Our Ground: A Critique of the Ethics & Strategy of Violence Against Fascist Assembly – Jason Lee Byas
3. Free Speech Dreams and Fascist Memes – Emmi Bevensee and Logan Yershov
4. On the Need for a Distinctly Libertarian Anti-Fascist Praxis – Grant Babcock
5. Antifa as Agorist Defense Organizations – Richard Tempelhoff
6. Nonviolence and the Benefits of “Cowardice” – Grayson English
7. A Meditation on Violence – Alex McHugh
8. Campus Speech and Anti-Fascism – Paul Dutton
9. Antifascism and Historical Memory – Aurora Apolito
10. A Pacifist’s Take on Punching Nazis – Summer Speaker
11. We Must Defeat Fascism by Any Means Necessary – Darian Worden
12. Beyond the Whack-A-Mole of No Platform – Jason Lee Byas
13. On Antifa’s Critics – Naomi Edhellos
14. Is Narrative the Whole Point? A Response to Jason Lee Byas – William Gillis
15. Determining a Threat When You’re the Target: A Response to Several Authors – Emmi Bevensee
16. On The Disease Model of Fascism: A Response to Bevensee and Yershov – Jason Lee Byas
17. Fighting Fascism in a Complex World: A Response to William Gillis – Jason Lee Byas

Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience.

Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email C4SS’s Mutual Exchange Coordinator, Cory Massimino, at cory.massimino@c4ss.org.