Anti-fascist groups, often called “antifa,” are popping up all around the United States, and a number of people have asked us for advice on forming a group.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Forming An Antifa Group: A Manual
Anti-fascist groups, often called “antifa,” are popping up all around the United States, and a number of people have asked us for advice on forming a group.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Forming An Antifa Group: A Manual
A new edition of Confronting Fascism, containing exactly the same material as in the first edition (though redesigned to look nicer) is now at the printers!
Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement is a series of texts that came out of conversations revolutionaries in and around Anti-Racist Action were having at the highpoint of the previous wave of antifascist organizing in North America.
First published in 2002 as a collaboration between Kersplebedeb, ARA Chicago, and the anarchist magazine Arsenal, Confronting Fascism is structured around a text by Don Hamerquist, “Fascism & Antifascism.” Hamerquist takes a wrecking ball to the mythology around fascism that had been traditionally peddled by the reformist left; against objections that fascists are just a distraction, or are simple-minded agents of the state and capital, he shows how fascism contains a revolutionary and even anticapitalist impulse thoroughly enmeshed with its own deeply oppressive and anti-liberatory politics. Unraveling what this means for antifascists and our strategies is the task at hand, and Hamerquist proceeds to lay down some important preliminary realities that we need to deal with. Almost twenty years later, what is most striking is how prescient so many of Hamerquist’s observations were, not only about the ambiguously dynamic appeal of fascism, but also about the specific characteristics of antifascist work and the advantages and disadvantages they confer.
J. Sakai follows Hamerquist, interrogating his analysis as he pushes it forward. Sakai argues against the idea that fascism comes primarily from the working class, just as he extends the point that fascism is not an inherently or essentially “white” ideology. A discussion of different forms of capitalist rule, the class structure of global imperialism, and the history of anticapitalist critique within both Italian and German “classical” fascism, flows into a contemporary contextualization of fascism within the neocolonial context; throughout, Sakai shows that support for fascism comes primarily from middle class men who are losing or being denied their traditional privileges, what many consider their birthrght, as a result of capitalist and imperialist “progress.” As such, a thread of parasitism and social revanchism is traced, connecting the tax resister from the American midwest to the racist bonehead in neoliberal Britain to the Taliban fighter in Afghanistan.
Shorter texts from the ARA Research Bulletin, Mark Salotte and Xtn of ARA Chicago, place these theoretical insights in the concrete context of the political and physical fight against the far right, while also recovering the connections between this fight and the broader rise of anticapitalist struggle at the time. Militant antifascist activism constituted an important factor in hemming in and ultimately thwarting the attempts at advance being made by several leading fascist groups at the time — it was a form of struggle that worked. Without providing any kind of blueprint for the current resurgent antifa movement, they nonetheless provide insights and frameworks that should be examined and integrated, so that those taking up the work today can draw upon what was done before.
Breaking with established Left practice, Confronting Fascism attempts to deal with the questions of fascism and antifascism in a serious and non-dogmatic manner. Attention is paid to to the class appeal of fascism, its continuities and breaks with the “regular” far-right and also even with the Left, the ways in which the fascist movement is flexible and the ways in which it isn’t. Left failures, both in opposing fascism head-on, and also in providing a viable alternative to right-wing revolt, are also dealt with at length.The lived experiences of anti-fascist activists inform this work, and more attention is paid to actual historical developments and facts than to neat theories that explain everything but only coincidentally intersect with reality. Understanding the relationship of fascism, the State, left reformism and what it means to be revolutionary are priorities in a world where it seems increasingly true that those who do not advance will have to retreat.
First published in 2017, Confronting Fascism was downloaded and purchased by thousands following the Trump election in 2016, making it suddenly “out of print”. This new edition consists of the same material as in the 2002 edition.
The Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens is an Islamophobic organization that held a “pop up” protest outside of a mosque in Toronto last week, and which is trying to instigate a number of racist marches across Canada on March 4th. In their callout, the racists explain that they are “calling on all Canadian Patriots that believe in Freedom, Liberty & Justice, that stand against Sharia Law & Globalization” to join these rallies.
This national far right gambit — coming just weeks after a young man with ties to the far right entered a mosque and opened fire, killing 6 people and wounding many more — is being responded to by a variety of different forces on the ground, which have organized several different antifascist actions the day in question. What follows is a partial list of the antifascist actions, which it would be really good for people to show up at:
Hotel De Ville De Montreal, 275 Rue Notre-Dame E from 11:30am to 2pm
Bloquons l’extrême droite islamophobe!: http://ift.tt/2loFdrX
Hotel De Ville De Quebec, 2 rue Desjardins, de 11h30 à 14h00
Contre-manifestation pour s’opposer à l’islamophobie: http://ift.tt/2kQLz4t
three different marches/rallies, all at Toronto City Hall (Nathan Phillips Square),
100 Queen Street West from 11am to 2pm
Counterprotest to Fight Islamophobia: http://ift.tt/2loJfR0
Fight Islamophobia!: Counter-protest against white supremacy: http://ift.tt/2kR1lfR
Stand against Islamophobia: http://ift.tt/2l3TIy4
Ottawa City Hall, 110 Laurier Avenue West from 12 to 2pm
Counter Rally Against Ottawa Islamophobes: http://ift.tt/2kR4Vqf
Hamilton City Hall, 71 Main Street West, from 12pm to 2pm
Counter Rally Against Hamilton Islamophobes: http://ift.tt/2l44TGQ
Winnipeg City Hall, 510 Main Street, from 11:30 to 2pm
Counter Rally against Winnipeg ISLAMOPHOBES: http://ift.tt/2kZs7ho
When first joining the u.s. left in the late 1950s, we had our local social-democratic group’s small May Day celebration in a room at the cheap edge of downtown. Memorably, there was a strip-tease joint downstairs, giving the building a kind of lumpen/proletarian air. At the speaker’s side of the room there was an older Jewish worker from one of the garment unions, with an elderly woman garment worker representing the inactive social-democratic “Italian chapter”. The audience was less than thirty persons, almost all whites The meeting was a remnant, of an old u.s. left from the 1930s industrial labor battles.
If you could skip ahead in time only a few years to the start of the 1960s, There would be many more people, but the old white trade unionists would be gone. The white side of the left was mostly young, university students or drop-outs. The many workers and poor street people in the struggle would be Black, and had their own movement. Almost everyone in the young left mixed in the civil rights movement or the student anti-war movement—or often both. It was easy for the u.s. white left to become dominantly middle-class, and the full future implications of that were never faced. This New Left would constantly attract a small stream of white working class kids, but almost as migrants from across a national border.
Once the u.s. left became allies and activists with the Black freedom movement in the 1960s-1970s, white areas even working class ones became enemy territory for us—those were places where you worried about physical attacks and violent mobs. Remember that America was always divided into oppressor territories and oppressed colonial territories—called the rez, barrios, and ghettos—and the white settler population were constantly engaged in daily social policing. Informally, a low-level war by whites of beatings and terrorism and killings happened every day to keep the angry colonies inside their social prisons.
But there was a real division in the white working class communities in the 1960s-70s. The white labor aristocracy, like hard-hat construction workers and over the road truckers, were used as patriotic shock troops by the government, politically and in attacking anti-war protests. On the other hand, we worked with many white working class youth who were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, and were anti-government and sharing a rebel youth culture. Many white working class GIs became antiwar in Vietnam, and some joined us in the resistance.
After Washington’s Vietnam pull-out in 1973, though, this contact with white working class rebels sharply dropped off. Recall, for a while was working in a major parts factory in the far South Side. A crew of young white guys there, who were mostly ’Nam vets and dope smokers, invited me to join their clique and come party at the Indianapolis 500 auto race with them. They even supported me for being night-shift union shop steward. The only thing they warned me about—is that i had to stop hanging with the young Black workers or else they wouldn’t even say hello. The euro-settler/Black divide was and is everything here, really.
Q. In the 1980s, you wrote the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. A new edition has been published recently. How is settlerism different from racism? It seems that some folks use the terms interchangeably.
A. Yes, often young anarchists or socialists here do use the words in an uncertain way, as though they mean the same. Settlerism, as we know, is a very specific type of capitalist colonialism. It is the most complete colonialism. A conquest society, where a loyal national population was brought in to both economically populate and be the permanent garrison for capitalism over the conquered territory.
Settlerism has within it the broader phenomena of racism, but is importantly different. The culture is capitalist but twisted further. Sometimes you can see the cultural mark of being a garrison population, like the American white “gun mania.” The ruling class has always supported a heavily armed white citizenry to keep colonized people under the boot. This is their neurotically guilty culture of would-be conquerors and genocidists. Settlerism means that we are always fighting “Americanism” itself, not just some extreme nationalistic form.
What the real deal is: Between 1963 and 1968, as violent and massive Black ghetto “riots” spread, the u.s. ruling class made two critical decisions. That Civil Rights would be made national law as an “airbag” to cushion the crash of repressing Black revolution, and that the real costs of any “integration” would be shifted completely onto the euro-settler working class.
People who weren’t around then can’t realize how bitter and explosive this was. Before, euro-settler workers may have gotten their hands dirty, but they had all the good paying jobs, it was that simple. Suddenly it was the same but different. About that time was graduating from the u.s. government mechanics school, trying to find a job. The state employment office sent me to the mechanics department at the big railway freight yards. In the office, the supervisor leaned back in his chair and said unhappily: “We heard that the government was going to pass this law, so we figured it was better you than a nigger!” That was still in the old days, when we always knew what white men were thinking, because they felt free to say out loud whatever crossed their minds. Of course, the white mechanics had gathered nearby in the garage to see the “new hire”, and together serenaded me with the then popular toothpaste commercial: “You’ll wonder where the YELLOW went/When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” ( Starting the daily harassment on the job. )
The point was, the white working class never had any “democratic” vote or say over this social tax on their communities. For two generations the u.s. ruling class solidified government, political parties, media and elections into an iron wall, enforcing this unpopular strategic concession. For the euro-settler working class communities shifting from being very privileged to less privileged. There never was any plebiscite or national popular vote on civil rights—which wouldn’t have passed. When the rare candidate to major office appeared who dead-on opposed civil rights, the establishment united to shoot him down. Famously, when Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazi leader David Duke ran for governor of the state of Louisiana in 1991, both parties united behind the Democratic candidate to block Duke, who still won 55% of the white vote. That was a signal flare of shipwreck sent up by settler communities, including but no means limited to their working class.
Donald Trump was today’s more respectable version of Duke. Marketing smarts told him that running on a platform of settler nationalism, of restoring the white nation to power and having a state publically dedicated to only their racial interests, would be the path to his elevation. The key to that would be his “dog whistle”, silently giving the piercing signal to euro-settlers that his was a united front of all whites in their common racial interests. He wouldn’t sell them out. What better way to silently do that than by conspicuously including the neo-nazis and klan haters in his campaign. Promoting the Confederate flag at his campaign rallies. Every Trump sexist vulgarity, every hate message and bullying threat, was only further proof to his enraptured followers that he wasn’t “politically correct” against them. That he would restore the white nation because at long last through him they could vote “civil rights” and the whole establishment agenda down.
The metropolitan elite, university-educated, residing in major urban areas, dominates the computer industry and global corporate sectors like finance and media. While backing Hillary and LGBT human rights for public politics and all that, in their own worlds they live in apartheid racial/gender discipline. In the futuristic Silicon Valley, computer firms like Twitter and Pinterest are each coincidentally 92% white and Asian for tech employees. Google is right there, too, with tech employees being 94% white and Asian. Same at other computer corporations. It isn’t hard to guess that there are ethnic quotas or near-blanket exclusions secretly agreed upon between these outspokenly liberal corporate leaders. It’s ironic that conservative white factory workers and small industrial employers in the Midwest may be for Trump, but have much more integrated workplaces. Incidentally, the liberal icon New York Times, where Paul Krugman’s columns appear, has 6 White House reporters, but none of them are Black. It has 21 sports reporters, but none of them are Black ( although basketball and American football, for instance, are heavily Black ). Their lifestyles section has no Black writers, although Black people do have real lives. So who is more racist and backward?
Right now we are at intermission. As the previous left from the 1960s-70s has finally faded away, and exited the stage. In this transition, protest and struggle is starting all over again from ground zero. A new kind of radical movement with its own politics and startling ideas is still to come. But it had better have a real power hook-up for working class heroes and outcasts.
An earlier version of this story appeared in Das Magazin in December. On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
An earlier version of this story appeared in Das Magazin in December. On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
Police said that between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. an employee at the Khadijah Masjid Islamic Centre in Montreal’s Pointe-Sainte-Charles neighbourhood discovered a window had been smashed with a heavy object. The building had also been egged.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Mosque vandalized in Montreal’s Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood
Police said that between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. an employee at the Khadijah Masjid Islamic Centre in Montreal's Pointe-Sainte-Charles neighbourhood discovered a window had been smashed with a heavy object. The building had also been egged.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Mosque vandalized in Montreal's Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood
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