It was no Harpers Ferry: August 22d wasn’t an accident, it was a product of our thinking

The following is part of a series of responses to the events of August 22, 2001 (A22) in Portland, Oregon. We support any and all genuine and honest discussion that is of use to our movements regardless of whether we agree with what is raised and put forward. We also understand that real debate can be sharp and at times raw. We will attempt to be conscious of this and as stated previously, a fundamental part of our guidelines are based on 

principled responses, not personal attacks or sectarian squabbles (or, for that matter, uncritical boosterism). We also ask that submissions take into consideration issues of movement security, remembering that both the fascists and the state will be searching for faultiness to divide our movements.  

We appreciate the responses we have received and look forward to those others working to contribute to this discussion. – 3WF

It was no Harpers Ferry: August 22d wasn’t an accident, it was a product of our thinking

by Iain W

I stood in a crowd of white men, blending in seamlessly. I was just another white man. The moment of hostility came when I failed to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, failed to take off my hat, and didn't put my hand over my heart. I hadn't chosen to out myself, it's just that it never occurred to be to participate in that particular performance.  It was April 15, 2009, and I was checking out a Tea Party Rally in Downtown Portland. 

Past the dwindling Nazi Bonehead sets, this city was leftist property. So, it was mostly a curiosity to see so many Republicans in one place.

There were several features that haunt me from that day. There were more Carhartts then khakis in the crowd, and younger people included, some wearing the Guy Fawkes mask, a sure sign of political incoherence. From the stage the speakers had no real problem calling for armed revolt and bloodletting, watering the tree of liberty and such. The GOP had no problem with the rhetoric, signing up voters for the next midterms: the GOP has always been a good deal more radical then the Democrats. The Koch brothers produced signs they carried had the slogan “runaway taxes + huge government = SLAVERY”. The "slavery" was in bold type, and from a distance all you saw was a bunch of white men carrying a sign that said "slavery." Obama as The Joker would come along a bit later.  

I recall thinking, not at that time, but in the year or so that followed, that no one seemed to be confronting the Tea Party, with its barely coded white supremacy and expression of an actual mass participatory base. It felt like a void, waiting to be filled, but the pushback never materialized. It was a missed opportunity. That same yawning chasm would open up just a few years later with Trump, but the void would be filled with the far left, most specifically by existing anarchist and communist cadre/affinity groups, to become known broadly as "ANTIFA" in the press. In some ways, ANTIFA is a trap, a narrowing of the scope of concern or proactive solutions for hundreds of millions of people wallowing in the wreckage of late capitalism. Antifascism requires fascism for meaning, and cannot help but sweep such limitations into its scope. 

But back in 2009, most of us saw only the theoretical possibility of the Tea Party slipping its libertarian corporate masters, and asserting itself as a nominally autonomous social force. We, my political collectivity included, were mostly still fighting the last war, against the remnants of the Nazi bonehead crews. 

The shadow war that took place in the decades before the current era was mostly one over counter-cultural social spaces, and territory within urban centers. This is where most the ARA tactics that got folded into ANTIFA, the "we go where they go" and "no platforming" developed. In those times most the work was physical confrontation and street level violence, undermining of Nazi and white supremacist public events and organizing, and doxing before doxing was called doxing.

What this was, was political repression — of course. We actively repressed our enemies. And the constituency for the war against the far right was the counter-cultural punk scene. In a few places, because of good work, thoughtful organizing, and decent politics, that broke past the punk scene, and incorporated broader social layers into the fight against the fascists. But by and large, aside from salacious TV shows, that war was off the national radar. Nazis and conscious white supremacists were just as marginalized as the far left confronting them. Official society didn't have much use for either of us, contrary to our shared assumptions about each other.

When Donald Trump came along, he lit the fuse to the powder keg that the elites had been packing since the 2008 capitalist collapse. And things started moving, well, rather quickly. A toxic brew of the far-right started bubbling away, 3%ers, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, Spencer's Nazi's, and a grab bag of other forces contended for Trump's coattails. By and large, the Nazis and overt white nationalists lost this struggle, both within the rightist coalition, and through persecution, from the state and from the left. But the remainder is perhaps more dangerous, and a graver threat to the left and marginalized groups, not so much for its overt virulence, but its reach and potential popular grassroots support.

In typical liberal fashion, the progressive establishment had no answer for the rise of a far-right as an actual movement organizing in the streets. But the far-left stepped into that role, and suddenly became a social force with recognition on a national, if not international level. This was, and continues to be, a fundamental transformation of the political conversation in society, and a profound opportunity. To a large degree, I think we have squandered it, and are being out-maneuvered by reactionary forces. 

In typical liberal fashion, the progressive establishment had no answer for the rise of a far-right as an actual movement organizing in the streets. But the far-left stepped into that role, and suddenly became a social force with recognition on a national, if not international level. This was, and continues to be, a fundamental transformation of the political conversation in society, and a profound opportunity. To a large degree, I think we have squandered it, and are being out-maneuvered by reactionary forces.

I think most of our shortcomings lie in our fidelity to the frameworks that got built over the last several decades in confronting the far-right, and how they fail to scale up to today's moment. There seems to be little conversation about the implications of the new terrain we occupy, just attempts to reapply inherited tactics built in a different era. 

Our first shaky foundation is "No platforming," the notion that some perspectives are simply too abhorrent to allow public space, and must be repressed. It relies ultimately on a social sanction from the wider community; it demands that a side be taken, and precludes any debate of ideas. What this requires is that social intuitions, the music clubs, the media outlets, the universities, and people in control of physical spaces and infrastructure agree to where this line is. If they fail to pick our side, they have to pay a public price, and maybe some insurance deductibles as well.      

When "we go where they go" got coined, there were not several quality digital cameras on most commercial buildings. Most people did not have a video camera in their pocket. The media was composed of professionals working for slow-footed corporate newsrooms, and did not cover the beat down of a few peckerwoods at the local bar. It was a strategy of relentless pressure on the social spaces Nazis tried to cultivate and infiltrate. We do not live in that world today. When we went where they went, chances were it would not end up in court. 

When we think about the community we had been accountable to, it was us, the far-left, mostly a counter-cultural nexus composed of a few hundred to a few thousand people in most urban centers across the country. We had a rather high degree of shared values, on paper at any rate. Even here, disagreements are sharp, and propel us towards unending schism while we cancel each other — sometimes for heinous behavior, sometimes over petty sectarian beefs, often for a refusal to extend any good faith or mutual humility towards each other. But through most of it we all could get on board together for smashing Nazis. 

Today, many of the dynamics that constructed the tactics we follow are gone. Surveillance is everywhere. The media system has been shattered into thousands of little shards. The internet makes new ways to communicate and share information, and algorithms sit above it all, gathering information for whoever can afford to buy it. The social forces operating today on all sides have exploded past the rather narrow parameters we operated in for the last several decades. The entire world has shifted under us, and we have played a role in it. But our categories and understandings that inform our tactics are pretty stubborn things, and we should ask if we cling to them to explain the world to ourselves, or just to explain ourselves to each other.  

It feels like we are attempting to shove the new world back into the old one. Black Bloc attacks the media, even small-time stringers who may be sympathetic. It attacks passers-by that may have the gall to film a few hundred people blocked up in the middle of a downtown core, in the middle of the day. The bloc demands no one record or film them, when every person has a video camera in their pocket, and a platform to share content with millions of people around the world almost instantly. Does one imagine this is a winning, or even a feasible strategy? And what is the outcome of such approaches? 

We should be clear: this is repression of the press, and even of the general public. It's not a flattering feature, and it's more than a PR problem.  It's a question of how power operates, and what we do with ours. There may be a rational kernel behind it, but it opens up another set of questions, and has implications for the sort of confidences we might prefer people have in us. If we subordinate other people's freedoms for our security, there’s little chance to win society over to a liberatory project through our pathways. More than likely, people will find the public repressive display alienating and repulsive. The marginal security that is gained from attacking the press and the public costs incalculable credibility with society.  

As to the second cornerstone of Antifa, "We Go Where They Go" has increasingly become its opposite. We don't "go where they go," because we have no organized presence in the places they go, and no plan or capacity to build that. Right now the Proud Boys have no end of social space to occupy in the exurbs. Nor is it very likely that the owners of the bars would give two shits about an attempt at cancellation. They would use it as a marketing strategy, emboldening and empowering reaction.   So, we are left with fights in the urban cores that we are used to defending, and "going where they go" is really them coming to where we are. On August 22nd this was clear as could be, when a small group of people perhaps too literally applied the slogan.

As to the second cornerstone of Antifa, "We Go Where They Go" has increasingly become its opposite. We don't "go where they go," because we have no organized presence in the places they go, and no plan or capacity to build that.

When we look at no platforming, it is often the act of no platforming that constructs the very platform reactionaries stand on. This is what the current debate about cancel culture is, and I believe the right is winning there. Jordan Peterson is a great example. He would still be an obscure professor in Canada, teaching esoteric Jungian garbage to a handful of zoned out Canadians had he not seen the opportunity to build a brand on the "illiberal" left. His ideas have strength mostly because we won't be bothered to push them over, as doing so would only legitimize him, so the thinking goes. But here we miss the point.

It's not always clear where one puts the marker down for a refusal to debate ideas we find abhorrent. When fascism is clear cut, it's easy to repress it. But what about ideas that tens or even hundreds of millions of people hold as "common sense"? Do we imagine that we will repress those millions of people into accepting our notions of how the world is organized? Because if you don't work to confront reactionary ideas that have been broadly perpetrated as common sense through argument and discussion, what's our other option, besides, you know, defeat? 

Our notions of the social base of fascists often fails to recognize the disparate and contradictory elements within the broader milieu of far-right organizing, at times pushing forces together we should be looking to tear apart. We point at a truck carrying a black man, a pacific islander, and a woman shooting paintballs at leftists and call them white supremacists. Fascism is a dynamic force that we try to fit into static categories at our peril. They are making a play to cohere a new broad base, while we narrow ours to "people we can trust." Any study of revolution will show a dizzying array of mind-bending coalitions and temporary alliances so deep with contradictions and betrayals that any solid ground we find ourselves on should be foremost taken as illusion.  

Such observations must be made with humility, but I have little doubt that we are moving into even sharper times, where millions and millions of people will be drawn into a struggle to survive. We should not be deterministic about where people will jump based on our own categories, be they gendered, racial or class-informed. These are abstractions developed in a certain time, and must constantly be reassessed through acute awareness and curiosity, not simply replicated through confirmation bias. Our goal must be to build structures that can encompass the desires and dreams of hundreds of millions of people, to split the mass base away from systems of hierarchy towards egalitarian liberty and human solidarity.

I have little doubt that we are moving into even sharper times, where millions and millions of people will be drawn into a struggle to survive. We should not be deterministic about where people will jump based on our own categories, be they gendered, racial or class-informed. These are abstractions developed in a certain time, and must constantly be reassessed through acute awareness and curiosity, not simply replicated through confirmation bias. Our goal must be to build structures that can encompass the desires and dreams of hundreds of millions of people, to split the mass base away from systems of hierarchy towards egalitarian liberty and human solidarity.

We will need to be more thoughtful towards showing people a world we want to build, a more open hand than closed fist. This is not an argument against political repression, or for pacifism. There should be no doubt violence and political repression will be elements to what's ahead. Fascists should be smashed, but it does not always need to be a public spectacle, and may be more effective, and safer when it’s not. Such a context does require narrow participation, high levels of security, but it bumps less up against the perhaps greater need for mass participatory activity — not only against fascism, but for a different world. It requires less collateral repression of media actors and the general public.  And when it is the repression of fascists is a public spectacle, the concern should be in decisive victories that enjoy popular support.

Iain W is a part-time leftist who lives in Portland, OR and occasionally tries to be useful.

Related posts:

Understanding A22 PDX: discussion and analysis for the antifascist movements

Understanding A22 PDX: Three Responses

Understanding A22 PDX: Never Let the Nazis Have the Story! The Narrative Aspect of Conflict

Understanding A22 PDX: Broader implications for militant movements

Understanding A22 PDX: Response from a Comrade, "We Go Where They Go" as strategy for militant antifascism

There Will Always Be More Of Us: Antifascist Organizing

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“Create a fire in you to fight injustice”: How some Christian theocrats co-opt liberatory themes

New Apostolic Reformers advocate Christian dominance through spiritual warfare, yet some of them also call for empowering women and combating racism.

Charismatics seeking dominion over society

The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is a powerful movement within the Christian right and a leading force for turning the United States into a theocracy. Theologically, NAR is a branch of evangelical Christianity and more specifically the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement, which claims that modern Christians can practice miracles such as faith healing and divine prophecy. Politically, NAR promotes dominionism, the belief that Christians need to “take dominion” over society—in other words, impose their version of biblical law on the rest of us.

Cindy Jacobs, one of NAR's top leaders,
wants to “put steel in [women's] backbone”

New Apostolic Reformation organizations promote many standard Christian right themes, such as denouncing same-sex marriage, rejecting abortion rights, vilifying transgender people, and advocating school prayer. The movement’s goals go far beyond specific issues. A distinctive NAR phrase is the call to “reclaim the seven mountains,” meaning seven key areas of society (government, media, family, business, education, religion, and arts/entertainment); thus some critics refer to the movement as “Seven Mountains Dominionism.” This means that NAR doesn’t just want to pass some reactionary laws—it wants to impose a comprehensive transformation of all major institutions and cultural spheres. It regards those who oppose its aims as not just misguided but as agents of Satan.

NAR promotes “strategic-level spiritual warfare” to cast out demons who supposedly rule over whole territories, institutions, or groups of people. Prayer and worship are seen as key weapons in this struggle; one tactic used is “prayerwalking,” in which a team of people walks through a neighborhood or city and battles the evil spirit controlling it. And some NAR leaders have declared openly that they envision a coming revolution or civil war that will propel their side to victory.

NAR crystallized in the mid 1990s and has grown rapidly both in North America and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Leaders of NAR are called “apostles” and “prophets,” and the movement is organized as an overlapping set of ministerial networks, which in turn are joined through coordinating bodies such as the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders. It’s hard to know just how big the movement is, but by one 2013 estimate some 3 million people attend NAR-affiliated churches in the United States alone, and millions more in other countries. 

Despite its size and authoritarian politics, New Apostolic Reformation has received little or no attention from most anti-fascist organizations and websites. Fortunately, over the past decade Political Research Associates and the online magazine Religion Dispatches have provided helpful analyses of the movement and its relationship with the larger Christian right, by authors such as Sarah Posner, Anthea Butler, Rachel Tabachnick, Frederick Clarkson, and Julie Ingersoll. Solid in-depth critiques of NAR have also been published by several Christian-identified periodicals, including Christianity Today and Apologetics Index (both of which are evangelical), Firebrand (Methodist), and Perspective Digest (Seventh-day Adventist).

Multicultural Trump supporters

NAR leaders embraced Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and were among Trump’s staunchest Christian right supporters throughout his presidency. Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor” who gave the invocation at his inauguration and later headed his evangelical advisory council, is a NAR apostle. New Apostolics have also played a key role in the movement falsely claiming that Trump won the 2020 election, through initiatives such as the Jericho March coalition, which used prayerwalking to ask God to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. During one post-election prayer broadcast, Paula White called on God to “take vengeance” against the “demonic” elements who stood in the way of Trump’s second term.

New Apostolic Reformation’s cordial relationship with Trump has helped it move into a strategically prominent role within the Republican Party coalition. For years, NAR has also been a dominant force in the Christian Zionist movement, which hopes that Israel’s rise will help trigger the End Times, when all Jews will convert to Christianity or be destroyed. And recently, some New Apostolics have also cultivated close ties with the Patriot movement.

All of this makes New Apostolic Reformation one of the most dangerous far right currents in the United States today. Yet this is also a movement with genuine ethnic and racial diversity, in which women and people of color play important leadership roles. And while some sections of the movement gloss over this diversity as a matter of individual success, other sections celebrate women’s empowerment and denounce racism as a pervasive problem that must be actively fought.

Some New Apostolics offer fairly standard, unadulterated right-wing propaganda. Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries, for example, recently published a twelve-part series of blog posts on “The Marxist Strategy for Taking Over America,” while Mario Murillo Ministries warned “the next phase of the LGBTQ agenda is to sexualize children.” Other sections of the movement add a sprinkling of multiculturalism, such as Harvest International Ministries (headed by Ché Ahn, who is Korean American), which commemorated Juneteenth to honor the end of slavery a few weeks before hosting Sarah Palin and Mike Pompeo as keynote speakers at a leadership development conference. Diane Lake of Starfire Ministries, a staunch Trump supporter, sounded like a centrist Democrat when she denounced the murder of George Floyd as “an astounding occurrence of injustice [and] legitimate cause for outrage” while condemning the “rapid descent from peaceful demonstrations and protests [for racial justice] into the state of absolute mayhem.” In other writings Lake has used scripture to argue that churches should not deny leadership roles to women.

Yet some NAR organizations and leaders go much further in co-opting progressive political themes. To explore this phenomenon, I recently watched several hours of video recordings from the July 2020 “Deborahs United” conference. This is a major annual event sponsored by Generals International, one of the most prominent NAR ministerial networks, and emceed by Apostle Cindy Jacobs, who founded Generals International with her husband in 1985 and helped form the New Apostolic Reformation movement over the following decade.

Edwina Findley urges NAR women
to fight racial injustice

 A conference to help women “overcome”

Deborahs United is a conference of and for women, and the title refers to Deborah in the Bible, who conference organizers celebrated as a “mother of a nation” but also as a judge, prophet, and military leader who played a key role in a time of crisis. The theme of the 2020 conference was “overcoming,” with a series of presentations aimed to inspire, energize, and inform women to take action. As Jacobs put it early in the proceedings, “we want to put steel in your backbone.” She gave a plug for the Master’s in Women’s Leadership program at Wagner University (named for NAR founder C. Peter Wagner), which aims to “enable and mobilize women around the globe to advance the Kingdom across The Seven Mountains of society.” A majority of conference speakers were white women, but presenters were also Asian, Arab, and African American; Mexican; and Afro-Caribbean. And while some of the focus was on overcoming personal adversity, a large part of it was framed as combating injustice.

Deborahs United speakers harnessed genuine concerns about oppression to a right-wing theocratic agenda in sophisticated ways. For example, Egyptian American attorney Jacqueline Isaac and her mother, Dr. Yvette Isaac, spoke about their work with their NGO Roads of Success publicizing the persecution of Christians in Syria. Syrian Christians have indeed faced violence and forced conversion at the hands of the Islamic State and others, yet selectively highlighting their persecution can be framed in ways that bolster Islamophobia. As another example, several speakers at the conference, such as Sharon Ngai of the organization Justice Speaks, addressed the issue of human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking. Here again, there is an underlying reality—that some women and children are forced into sex work and other forms of labor—yet many Christian rightists have framed that reality in ways that demonize all sex work, romanticize sexual purity and heterosexual marriage, and ignore the larger dynamics of women and children as special targets of capitalist exploitation worldwide.  

At the same time, some of the Deborahs United speakers tested the boundaries of right-wing discourse in ways that would make many Trump supporters uncomfortable. Dr. Pat Francis, a Caribbean Canadian, called racism “a demonic force that hates every human being, that want to get rid of certain people: Blacks, Indians, Jews, Armenians, Africans. Torture, torment, killing, deportation, displacement, violence, abuse.” She denounced “extreme nationalist movements” and—following a line of thought directly at odds with “Build the Wall” nativism—declared

“However God created you, the color of your skin, everything about you is purpose. The culture that you were born in, everything about you is purpose. You are born in one country, you move to another country, everything about you is purpose. The reason that you live, you were created in the image of God… Everything about you is purpose-driven, and you are needed in the world for such a time as this.”

African American actress Edwina Findley (whose acting credits include The Wire and Fear the Walking Dead) opened her talk with a personal account of racist violence from her teenage years, describing an incident when she and a group of friends were out on the Mall in Washington and were physically attacked by police without provocation. She declared that racist attacks in the USA have “been happening for hundreds of years, but sadly many of us have turned a deaf ear, a blind eye, or have simply shut our mouths in the face of brutal injustice.” She concluded, “I just want to encourage you all as my sisters, to find ways of fighting injustice in your own community, in your own place of influence.... I pray that we will reach across the aisle. I pray that we will reach across socioeconomic status. I pray that we will reach across racial lines.... I pray that we will overcome by the blood of the lamb and by the word of our testimony.”

Cindy Jacobs’s closing remarks at the conference exhorted women to action. “I want to create a fire in you today to fight injustice, to fight racism, to fight poverty.” She talked about growing up as a white girl in Texas in the 1950s and 60s. “Do you know there were cities here, they were called sundowner cities—if you were Black, you knew you had to be out of that city before the sun set.... And yes, we have come a ways, but we still have a ways to go.” She cited the heroic African American journalist Ida B. Wells as a role model—“an incredible figure in U.S. history”—and lamented that she was not taught about Wells in school. This is not radical anti-racism, certainly, but it’s also a far cry from “All Lives Matter” or right-wing diatribes about Critical Race Theory (which you can also find from some New Apostolics).

Paula White, a NAR apostle and
Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor

A more inclusive theocratic politics

The politics of Deborahs United 2020 should be seen in the context of larger developments in the Christian right. In terms of both gender and race, NAR as a whole and Generals International in particular contrast sharply with the earlier wave of theocratic politics centered on Christian Reconstructionism. Although Reconstructionists were among those who taught the New Apostolics to seek “dominion” over all social spheres, as a movement Reconstructionism has always been much more male dominated and all or nearly all white. Reconstructionists have been central to the rise of a “biblical patriarchy” movement, which declares that a woman’s main religious duty is “submission” to her husband, and some Reconstructionists rationalized Black slavery and embraced neo-Confederate politics.

On gender issues New Apostolic Reformation aligns much more closely with Christian right organizations such as Concerned Women for America, founded in 1978, which rejects feminism in favor of “traditional family values” but has often talked about encouraging women to think for themselves and make their own decisions, and which has offered a model of women as skilled professionals and public leaders. On race, NAR’s vision of unity echoes the 1994 founding of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America, which brought together previously separate white and Black church bodies and pledged to “work against all forms of personal and institutional racism.” (A year later the Southern Baptist Convention, the United States’ largest evangelical denomination, publicly apologized for its complicity in slavery and Jim Crow and pledged itself to eradicate racism.) 

At the same time, New Apostolic Reformation’s relative inclusiveness on gender and race clashes with its transphobia, homophobia, denial of reproductive rights, and support for Donald Trump. The Cindy Jacobs who praises Ida B. Wells and urges women not to be victims also urges state governments to “protect God-given gender identity and the unborn” and says that Trump—who repudiates everything that Ida B. Wells stood for—“will be seated and mantled with the power of God.” And all of these elements must be seen in the context of NAR's theocratic vision, the drive to impose its interpretation of biblical law on society through spiritual warfare and the purging of “demonic” forces. Far from moderating NAR's politics, these tensions highlight the far right’s capacity to harness liberatory impulses toward authoritarian and supremacist goals.

It's too easy to write off these tensions as a matter of hypocrisy, of far rightists using pretty words to hide some of their ugly beliefs. Keep in mind that Deborahs United isn't a public relations event. Its intended audience is committed New Apostolics, and its calls to fight injustice are part of the process of training and mobilizing the movement’s rank and file. While the contradictions might seem obvious to outsiders, many New Apostolics are sincere in their desire to combat injustice, unite all races, and empower women (or more accurately some cisgender, heterosexual women), and their belief that these aims are integrally tied to establishing God's Kingdom on Earth—just as many neoliberal feminists are sincere in claiming that (some) women's individual advancement in the capitalist marketplace is the way to overcome sexism. If we want to figure out how Trump was able to increase his support among white women, African Americans, and Latinx voters between 2016 and 2020, and if we want to understand the U.S. far right’s potential to mobilize mass support that isn’t white and male, the New Apostolic Reformation movement would be a good place to look.

Photo credits:

Cindy Jacobs: Still image captured from Facebook video, July 2020.
Edwina Findley:  By Benjo Arwas, 2014 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Paula White holding a Bible: By Kamau360 on assignment for Paula White Ministries, 13 December 2011 (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

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There Will Always Be More Of Us: Antifascist Organizing

In keeping with discussion and debate on A22 in PDX and its broader meanings for antifascism and developing a revolutionary liberatory vision, we post the following from Paul O'Banion in which, while making an assessment of that days organizing and actions, O'Banion also stresses that "Our fight against fascism is political, against their politics and for ours". - 3WF

Battle of Cable Street: antifascists vs fascists vs police

There Will Always Be More Of Us: Antifascist Organizing

by Paul O'Banion

The events of August 22^nd (A22) in Portland, Oregon were a clear victory, with hundreds of people turning out all afternoon on the downtown waterfront to confront the fascists — until it suddenly wasn’t.

The Proud Boys' last minute change of location — away from the waterfront to a parking lot a half-hour drive away (and even longer on the bus) — resulted in only a relatively small group in bloc engaging in a courageous but ill-considered attempt to confront them: going where they go, but without the necessary preparation and coordination. It turned into, at best, a shit show. Proud Boys smashed up a couple of vehicles, flipping one on its side, beat the shit out of some folks, and engaged in sustained attacks. Our side mobilized a black bloc of roughly thirty; covered Tiny, one of the Far Right’s main instigators, head-to-toe in paint, stopping his club-wielding charge in its tracks;  and attacked a photographer. Despite the relative success of the earlier waterfront mobilization, we didn’t end the day looking very good. It’s controversial, but optics matter. The narrative that is created about actions we are involved in is critical to our long-term success.

The events of A22 starkly illustrate the limits of fighting fascists on purely military or tactical grounds. For five years we have battled various fascists, the fascist adjacent, and fascist enabling in the Pacific Northwest, with the most brutal part of the whirlwind being Portland (and not for the first time!). Antifascists have done a remarkable job tirelessly defending against incursions, provocations, and attacks by the Far Right, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. There have been more mobilizations against Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other knuckleheads than one can remember. Established organizations, such as Rose City Antifa and the Pacific Northwest Antifascist Workers Collective, various crews, affinity groups, and collectives have done exemplary work. Yet, at best, we have achieved a kind of stalemate; at worse, in the larger national and international picture, we are losing.

So how do we start winning? In order to defeat the fascists in a decisive way we need to subsume our tactical struggle to the political one. Contextualizing street fights as one component of a larger effort keeps our focus on our long-term work to build a free, mutualistic, and egalitarian society. We need people on the front lines with skills in martial arts, first aid, and communications. We need people with hacking and doxing skills. And we need to continue developing material support infrastructure and mutual aid efforts for mobilizations. All of this is essential. But A22 showed us that, in-and-of-itself, all this will never be enough.

If we only develop the skills to make us a better fighting force, the fascists will out-maneuver us on the larger terrain and continue to build their movement. To complement our ability to deny the fash the streets and public platforms we need to better contest their attempt to win sympathy for their ideas. This means continuing the longer term, less glamorous work of organizing, talking with other working-class and oppressed people, developing ideas together; in short, creating a broad, popular movement aimed at fundamentally re-making society, getting at the roots of what gives rise to fascism in the first place. We should be able to respond to the questions that the Far Right is answering with our own alternative: a movement and liberatory culture that is so attractive to everyday people that they can’t resist the urge to become involved. Efforts towards establishing ‘everyday antifascism’ as commonplace is one example.

Politics partly involves developing a shared narrative that helps people make sense of the world. This is what the fascists are doing: they are providing stories that help people understand what is going on, providing a sense of meaning and belonging that is both comforting and supports taking action in the world. We too need to keep our focus on the big picture, on winning in the long-term. Our goal should be creating a broad-based popular movement to help create a non-fascist society. By developing our politics together and collectively envisioning what we want and how we think we can best get there, perhaps we will also gain more discipline as a movement — the kind of discipline that allows us not to rush into situations unprepared, disorganized and uncoordinated, to fight the fash on terrain they chose. We need the power and momentum to pick our battles.

What happens in the street is essential. Fascists, on principle, should not be allowed to gather, organize, or speak publicly. But how we do that will determine whether we win the larger war, not just one particular battle. How these confrontations play out to those watching from their workplaces, neighborhoods, bars, and homes is of the utmost importance in determining whether the majority of folks side with us, or support state and fascist violence against us.

The antifascist struggle in Germany is more practically and theoretically advanced, mainly because they’ve been doing it longer. As Bender, an autonomous antifa militant active in Berlin since the 1980s says, “The most important step … [is] to get organized in groups, which would have regular meetings and a clear membership… a common basis of understanding and common goals, and a clear name. These groups would be approachable for others outside the group, and capable of and willing to engage in alliances, they also could take better care of new, interested people. … The groups would also represent their positions publicly in a way that was open to participation.” Bender continues that antifascists should not fight fascists alone, stressing the importance of “temporary alliances with other groups outside the autonomous movement, such as other leftist groups, trade unions, … and so on.” But in collaborating with groups that may not share all of our politics, it is necessary “to maintain our positions and our forms in these alliances. That means to have – at least on a symbolic level – an autonomous standpoint and a radical expression, for example at demonstrations, by using the politics and tactics of the black bloc.

Those in autonomous antifa came to realize that they were becoming marginalized and isolated and that the larger narrative matters, which led them to understanding “the importance of better public relations and being concerned with media representation.” Bender suggests that we can both recognize the role media plays in maintaining the status quo and institutional power, while still engaging it “to produce pictures for the public, which nowadays has become, due to the mechanism of media and politics, part of the ‘society of the spectacle.’” This requires us to be smart about how society works, how people come to form opinions, and how everyday working people come to be willing take risks to fight fascism. It doesn’t mean toning down the level of militancy but better understanding the dynamics of how these confrontations are represented.

An International Struggle 

With the dizzying momentum of authoritarian movements around the world and, closer to home, the relentless march of Far Right Trumpist Republicans, we need to understand our struggle as not only local, but national and international. This requires us, as the Far Right is doing, to mobilize and organize a mass, popular movement. In this practical struggle and war of ideas, the fact that being antifascist or believing that Black lives matter are even controversial positions indicate that we are not even close to winning. One of our tasks is to develop antifascism as the “common sense.” If we do this, we can marginalize and limit the growth of fascism, better enabling us to defeat it.

Police clear antifascist's barricades from the Battle of Cable Streets

There are plenty of historical examples we can learn from in developing the antifascist movement. We can look at the organizing that brought out hundreds of thousands of people to defend the largely Jewish East End of London against a fascist march in 1936: the famous “Battle of Cable Street.” At that time, members of the Jewish and Irish communities, local workers and Labor and Communist party members, anarchists, antifascists, socialists, and pissed off Londoners all came out to the streets to fight Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and his 3,000 Blackshirts, not to mention the 6,000 police marshaled to protect them. The reason up to 300,000 people mobilized and stood up to Mosley and his fascists on that day is made clear in “The Battle of Cable Street: An Account of Working Class Struggles Against Fascism,” published by the London Trades Union Council SERTUC:

“A common cause of hatred of Fascism brought people together. Charlie Goodman made a name for himself during the battle when he climbed up a lamp post, exhorting people to fight back as they began to waver, and described one alliance: ‘it was not just a question of Jews being there, the most amazing thing was to see a silk-coated Orthodox Jew standing next to an Irish docker with a grappling iron. This was absolutely unbelievable. Because it was not a question of ... a punch up between the Jews and the Fascists, it was a question of people who understood what Fascism was.”

We can also look at how “Rock Against Racism” organized, also in England, this time in the late 1970s against the National Front, working with the Anti-Nazi League to turn-out tens of thousands of people in antiracist festivals that made being against fascism part of popular culture, doing so in a fun, engaging, and welcoming way. This is also the approach of today’s Pop Mob (Popular Mobilization) in Portland, Oregon, an organization that has succeeded on several occasions in turning out large numbers of people in part by creating a welcoming and safe place for new and uninitiated folks to come and take a stand. All this complements and backs up front-line fighters and those in bloc, which Pop Mob is explicit about. As Pop Mob spokesperson Effie Baum points out, “without the black bloc, we would not be safe out there because they are the ones who are protecting us from both the violence of the far right as well as the violence from the police, because they are the brave ones who put their bodies between us and those threats. So, the reason that we also have this big tent approach is because we do include that in our diversity of tactics. And I want folks … when they're out there, they will also see firsthand the truth, which is that they are being protected by people who are engaged in community defense and that it's not what they're seeing on TV.”

We can better win our battles with fascists in part by turning out far greater numbers than them. To do this well we need to reach out beyond those already convinced of the need for militant antifascism, going outside our scenes and comfort zones, having difficult conversations, developing politics with a wider group of people than are currently involved.

Examples of what this approach looks like on the ground here in the US is the broad-based antifascist mobilization against the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that turned out thousands of people; the work in the Bay Area that saw 10,000 folks, including a huge black bloc, show up to confront the “No to Marxism” rally planned in Berkeley later that same month; and in Portland, in August, 2018 when well over a thousand people marched against Patriot Prayer and other fascists behind a well-organized black bloc of several hundred.

Always Be More of Us

The first time I physically confronted Nazis was in Minneapolis in the early 1990s. I was strolling through the streets of Uptown with two comrades I was just getting to know. Our afternoon was suddenly interrupted when a teenager ran up and said, “Hey K-Dog, you used to be a Baldie, right?” K-Dog responded, “I still am a Baldie!” Our young friend excitedly told us he was just hanging out on the train tracks when two older dudes showed him their swastika tattoos and told him to “tell his friends that they are back.” This was just after the Baldies, an antiracist skinhead crew that helped initiate Anti-Racist Action (ARA), had successfully kicked Nazi boneheads out of Minneapolis. K-Dog quickly rounded up a crew of twenty people and we headed to the train tracks. Scouts up ahead spotted the Nazis, shouting back to the rest of us. The Nazis high-tailed it up and off the tracks and back into the streets. We finally surrounded them in a grocery store parking lot; I had a half brick in my hand, and we backed them into the store.

In that moment, with everyday American life swirling all around us, I thought how strange this was: a running battle between us, a motley crew of anarchists, punks, antiracist skins, and disaffected youth versus a couple of scraggly older Nazis. I felt a connection to the historic struggle between antifascism and fascism that has flared up across the last century, mobilizing millions. But here we were, on this warm sunny afternoon, a few dozen of us with crude, improvised weapons in a grocery store parking lot, confronting Nazis while complacent America went about its business. That confrontation between a handful of antifascist militants and a couple of Nazis has now grown far larger. We need to adjust accordingly. The street fights that Anti-Racist Action once engaged in now play out on a national and international level.  These fights are no longer only between fascist and antifascist subcultures. They involve all of society.

Our task is to better relate to the larger working-class and other oppressed communities, listen to what they are also going through, develop solidarity, mutual aid, and common understandings, while building power together. We can crush the fascists with numbers, sharing a collectively generated vision of a new society, figuring out how we get there along the way. Our fight against fascism is political, against their politics and for ours. We need to better develop and clarify just what our politics are.

The ongoing discussions and debates amongst antifa, and in sympathetic aligned movements such as anarchism, Indigenous resistance, queer and trans liberation, and the environmental movement, in addition to fora such as this, need to spread amongst our co-workers, neighbors, friends, and family.

During that altercation in Minneapolis, those two disheveled Nazis briefly emerged through the automatic doors of the grocery store to show us their faces and yell, “The only reason you won is cause there’s more of you than us!” To which K-Dog immediately responded, “There’ll always be more of us than you!” And that’s what we should remember: there will always be more of us than them, but only if we out-organize them.

Paul O’Banion is an anarchist organizer. He was active in Minneapolis & New York in the 1990s and is a former member of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. O’Banion has organized in Portland for the last two decades, most recently helping found Pop Mob (Popular Mobilization). His Twitter is @Diggers1616

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Understanding A22 PDX: Response from a Comrade, "We Go Where They Go" as strategy for militant antifascism

A22 PDX. PB and antifascist confrontation. Photo via AP

by A Comrade

I largely agree with many of the evaluations that the decision to go and confront the fascists at Parkrose was poorly executed and handed the fascists a victory. A lot of other writeups have covered things I would have covered, but I have two additional points I’d like to make.

1. Some of the people critical of the bloc that went to Parkrose have stated that without that loss, the day would have been a certain victory. I am not fully convinced of this. Yes, you can point to this happening the previous year, but that does not mean it will play out the same way again. If the bloc hadn’t of shown up, some fascists very well might have been drunk/coked up and bored enough to go looking for a fight. They might have taken it out on marginalized people or folks who looked close enough to antifa to count. We’ve seen fascists do this before, and this is part of why “we go where they go.” They might have gone downtown after all. A few of them might have gone hunting and assassinated someone in a driveby. There are many ways it might have played out differently, many of which could still have played out with a defeat for our side. Pretending like sticking to the plan and staying downtown in the park would have resulted in a certain victory is dishonest.

2. Anti-Racist Action adopted the slogan “we go where they go—never let the fascists have the streets” for multiple reasons. One was that facing up to them in the street and depriving them of a victory was the best way to demoralize them, shatter their macho and superior self-image, and impede their future organizing. Decades of anti-fascism have shown this to be the best course. Second was to counter liberalism and take the political stances that a) ignoring them doesn’t make them go away and b) we can’t rely on the cops or state to protect us. We protect us. And third, it was to protect others. The presence of armed and dangerous fascists is an active threat to all sorts of people. Letting them roam freely is not an option we can allow.

That all said, that doesn’t mean run right up to the danger irresponsibly. There are plenty of ways the fascists could’ve been opposed in Parkrose that didn’t involve a straight-up confrontation, especially an outnumbered one. Sabotage. Hit-and-run tactics. Use your imagination. “Be like water” doesn’t just apply to avoiding police kettles, it can apply to hounding the fash too. Now, every situation needs to be analyzed on its own. Some of these tactics might have just provoked the fash, spurring them to caravan away or lash out at others. But if they felt isolated and vulnerable enough, they might’ve circled their wagons and then fled.

Perhaps most importantly — a confrontation or the tactics above may have not been the best way to go about it either. Simply monitoring the fash and having a strong enough presence in the vicinity to jump into action if needed may have been enough. This could have resulted in the same end result that the fash looked silly and did nothing that some people predicted would have happened otherwise, while still being able to confront them if the need arose or if a more tactically advantageous situation presented itself. We need to be able to improvise and adapt to situations quickly.

I don’t think the folks who went to Parkrose had the wrong idea to go out there. I do think the way it went down was unplanned, disorganized, and ended up in a demoralizing rout for us. We can do better. We will do better. We have to.

 

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The following is a response by Don H. to the discussion. It goes beyond the specifics of PDX and looks more at the generalized meanings and risks of and for militant organizing, strategies and actions.

militant movements can have features that undermine its political base and contribute to its premature exhaustion. This potential is maximized by the very common tendency to justify actions and attitudes by treating any victims or complainants as political opponents and/or class enemies when that is not true or, at least, well before it has been convincingly established…

 

As the struggle becomes more intense, I think it becomes important to draw clear and operational lines between combatants and non-combatants. More crucially, it raises the need to actively work to recognize and limit any collateral damages that follow from the actions of our side – damages to bystanders and/or to fellow participants. I shouldn’t have to point out that such damages can’t be limited, if they are never acknowledged.

 

Broader implications for militant movements

Contribution by Don H.

I don’t have much to add on the specific points at issue in this discussion. However, I think some general issues lurking behind the discussion shouldn’t be lost as the immediate tactical questions lose their urgency.

I think the current movement confronts two important problems that must be dealt with simultaneously if there is any possibility to avoid a recurring mess of unproductive conflicts and contradictions.

A healthy and growing movement needs a leading edge characterized by a militant and systematic rejection and refusal of capitalist power and culture.  Such a movement also needs a popular base that sees the movement as generally representative of its interests and that replenishes and expands purposive participation in it. The development and defense of both aspects of the movement are essential for a viable struggle. However, the relationship between them is seldom simple and self-evident over any substantial time.

I hope you’ll tolerate a couple of points about how these dilemmas have been operative in my very long, but not particularly noteworthy, political life. They are not ordered by chronology or by relative significance and will remain a bit cryptic to protect the guilty.

As STO (Sojourner Truth Organization) was reaching the end of its rope in the early eighties, a number of us had become increasingly concerned with developing a challenge to the pacificism and legalism that had dominated much of the movement in its fairly precipitous decline since the early seventies. The dual focus of our specific political work – production organizing and political support for clandestine armed groupings in this country and internationally - each produced major pressures in this direction. However, starting in the early eighties we began to consciously develop approaches that emphasized confrontational direct action outside the parameters of legally acceptable dissent.

Some who had been associated with our political tendency saw this changed direction as crazed while others, less friendly, called it ‘macho assholeist’. Nevertheless, very gradually and not really in any important way as a consequence of anything we did, the general approach became more broadly accepted - first in antifascist organization and later in anti-globalization efforts. Now the popular legitimacy of mass illegality is increasingly evident in every popular upsurge in this country. After having lived through multiple decades when it was virtually absent, I can’t overemphasize the importance of this factor and this inclines me to the side of those that prioritize the protection and promotion of the leading edge of the struggle - even where it includes mistakes that are real and serious.

However, militant movements can have features that undermine its political base and contribute to its premature exhaustion. This potential is maximized by the very common tendency to justify actions and attitudes by treating any victims or complainants as political opponents and/or class enemies when that is not true or, at least, well before it has been convincingly established. I think of the FALN’s (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional) Fraunces Tavern bombing, where the four casualties were pictured as Wall Street operatives when they were actually clerks; and a number of occasions in my experience where mistaken charges of agent or provocateur produced them from less single-minded and committed cadres.

As the struggle becomes more intense, I think it becomes important to draw clear and operational lines between combatants and non-combatants. More crucially, it raises the need to actively work to recognize and limit any collateral damages that follow from the actions of our side – damages to bystanders and/or to fellow participants. I shouldn’t have to point out that such damages can’t be limited, if they are never acknowledged. Proper handling of such issues requires some self-discipline in the leading edge groupings. More important and more difficult, it requires that these groupings are actually receptive to criticisms from outside their organizational boundaries.

In this context, I don’t agree with the view of the relationship between leading militant activists, ‘front-liners’, and the rest of the movement and its potential base – not to mention the rest of the world – that has been presented in various anonymous reports from the George Floyd actions in Portland, Twin Cities, and elsewhere that we have all seen. Along with some useful insights, these tend to discount the importance of strengthening the links between the social base and constituency of the struggle and its “front-liners”.

Consider some implications of such issues in a different historical period – the late sixties and early seventies - that arguably has similarities with the current context. Perhaps that situation was closer to ungovernable; with rebellions in the Black urban cores, Black worker uprisings in basic industry, widespread high school and college walkouts, insurgent elements in the military, draft refusal, etc; although the failed state characteristics and the questions of the legitimacy of the capitalist order were more submerged then than they are presently. In any case parallel problems with relationships between leading elements and mass constituencies were certainly evident then.

I was close to the side of it that involved the fragmenting of SDS and the emergence and quick decline of Weather, that, I think, provides important cautions for potential problems of the present. In the late sixties, and particularly in that arena of protest, the overall outlook of the mass movements had shifted very rapidly towards radicalism and revolution. For SDS there was a brief hesitation at a ‘Revolutionary Youth Movement’ that had some parallels to the black bloc phenomenon (although the over-riding importance of global anti-imperialism was a significant element of difference). Then, in a remarkably short time, sectors of RYM developed a ‘front-liners’ mentality with a degree of hubris that merits Gramsci’s ‘imbecilic self-sufficiency’ charge. This led to Weather’s ‘custeristic’ Days of Rage that began a process that in a very few months reduced its membership exponentially and transformed it into an ineffectual clandestine quasi-military formation. This removed an important segment of ‘front-liners’ and their immediate supporting periphery from active struggle. When Weather re-emerged a few years down the road, its politics had become indistinguishable from CP popular frontism. The internal critiques and splits that began promptly led to Prairie Fire and May 19th with their very different, although equally crippling, problems. I don’t want to push this analogy too far, but it’s important to be see how easily a struggle framework can internalize and militarize when a renewed appreciation of the objective difficulties of the struggle are produced by some tactical defeats. When that happens, first we get the shopworn ‘Better Fewer, But Better’ rationale and then the Anna Mae Aquash and Freddy Mendes type casualties and cases; then we get the lurch to the right and, ultimately, one or another form of incorporation marked with a flowering of what the Italians called the penetentis (sp).

I don’t mean any of this to understate the primary strategic problem; capitulating to a posited mass backwardness to justify a lowest common denominator strategy with tactics and ‘optics’ that won’t ‘alienate’ some illusory base. This approach usually metamorphosizes into some preferred pathway of the ‘liberal’ component of the structure of oppression. Its rejection is what is healthiest about the current scene.

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Understanding A22 PDX: Three Responses

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Understanding A22 PDX: Response from a Comrade, "We Go Where They Go" as strategy for militant antifascism

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Proud Boys Rally at Delta Park, PDX in 2020. Photo from WaPo.com

The following is part of a series of responses to the events of August 22, 2001 (A22) in Portland, Oregon. They are part of the broader discussion surrounding A22 that we are highlighting. We support any and all genuine and honest discussion that is of use to our movements regardless of whether we agree with what is raised and put forward. We also understand that real debate can be sharp and at times raw. We will attempt to be conscious of this and as stated previously, a fundamental part of our guidelines are based on 

principled responses, not personal attacks or sectarian squabbles (or, for that matter, uncritical boosterism). We also ask that submissions take into consideration issues of movement security, remembering that both the fascists and the state will be searching for faultiness to divide our movements.  

We appreciate the responses we have received and look forward to those others working to contribute to this discussion. – 3WF 

*For additional articles please check Rose City Counter-Info who have also been doing good work in making their site a platform for discussion on A22 and antifascism.

Never Let the Nazis Have the Story!

The Narrative Aspect of Conflict

by Kristian Williams

On August 22, 2021, Portland saw yet another of its now-almost-routine street fights between Far Right and Far Left — roughly speaking, fascists and antifascists.

What should have been an easy victory for the Left turned instead into a total rout. The Left had won before the day even started, and then lost before the night fell.

The Right — Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and like-minded bad actors — had originally planned for a rally in downtown Portland, a spot clearly selected for maximum visibility and media exposure. Assorted antifascist forces organized a counter-protest for the same place and the same time, expecting but not exactly calling for conflict. In the days leading up to the event, the Far Right organizers did the math, decided that they didn't like the odds, and at the last minute moved their rally several miles to the east, to the desolate parking lot of a shuttered Kmart.[1]This, especially with their low numbers, made them look scared and weak, and a grimy parking lot in front of an extinct business served as a practical metaphor for their dead-ender ideology. Had the antifascists just stayed downtown, declared victory, and enjoyed the party, the narrative would almost certainly have been that hundreds of antifascists forced the Proud Boys out of downtown, leading them to hide in a vacant lot and cry.

Instead, a minority of militants — a couple dozen from a crowd of three or four hundred — left the main antifascist demonstration and went to attack the Right's rally. In short order, they were violently repelled, leading to an ignominious retreat. They abandoned two vehicles, which the fascists used as piñatas, and left behind the drivers, one of whom appears to have been fairly badly hurt. It was a debacle, by almost any standard.

This is one of those strange situations when history allows for an almost one-to-one comparison. About a year earlier, in September 2020, the last time the Proud Boys attempted a major incursion into Portland, a broad antifascist coalition had a rally in a populated and lively neighborhood, while the Proud Boys moved their demo to a remote part of the city. Almost a thousand people came to the antifascist event, and it went on for hours. About two hundred went to the Right's, and it lasted two hours or less. The antifascists had speakers and bands and managed to create a fun (or at least fun-like) atmosphere, despite the teams with automatic rifles standing guard. The Proud Boys moped around in a muddy park, looking desperately over-armored, and complaining about how Antifa didn't even show up. They looked ridiculous, weak, and basically unloved. Their rally was universally understood as a humiliating defeat.[2]

This year could have been a repeat of that, but even more so. The Right's numbers were smaller, their location was even more pathetic-seeming, and the sudden change of venue gave every appearance that they had been scared away from downtown. Instead, the narrative is "Antifa attacked and got their ass kicked" — which is exactly the narrative the Right wants.

Over the last few years the Right started using these confrontations as their main recruiting device. The image of these clashes is central to their propaganda, and an important element of their group identity and collective self-conception.[3]

To use these incidents in that way, they need to deploy two narratives in close sequence, a victim narrative and a victory narrative. In their victim fable, they are innocent patriots, just loving America and praying to God, and enjoying some old fashioned Constitutionally-protected free speech, when along come the intolerant goons of Antifa to violently attack anyone with whom they disagree. In the victory narrative, the bold, strong, resourceful, courageous heroes of the Proud Boys step forward to defend the freedom-loving patriots, vanquish the barbaric hordes of intolerant Antifas, and redeem their community, white masculinity, and/or America.[4]

The ill-fated black bloc offensive perfectly fed into this dual narrative. It produced a military defeat, and from the looks of it some people got pretty badly hurt. But what is far worse is that it handed the Right a political victory. It solidified their self-conception, gave them a perfect tool for recruiting, and amplified their propaganda points far outside of their creepy online echo-chambers.

The narrative dimension of conflict should not be treated as an afterthought or cynically dismissed as a matter of "public relations," "optics," or "respectability politics." In this sort of conflict, the control of the narrative is more important, and has more lasting effect, than the control of territory. We may hold or cede territory for a few hours or a few weeks, but the story that is constructed about that — not just victory or defeat, but the normative elements of right and wrong, heroic or cowardly, virtuous and vicious — can shape a conflict for years to come. The struggle for the narrative is the struggle for legitimacy, and legitimacy will determine almost everything else: recruiting, fundraising, alliances with other groups, the public's cooperation, and to some degree even the behavior of the press and the courts.

Of course, the narrative isn't everything that matters. But in this case, there was not even a trade-off. It is not like we won the battle but it looked bad on television. We handily lost the physical confrontation and it looked bad on television. It surely left the brawlers on the Far Right feeling more emboldened, and it makes it more likely that they will return — sooner rather than later, and in greater numbers. Naturally that is the opposite of what was intended.

Defending their decision to attack, one of the crews comprising that day's black bloc has composed a self-righteous and self-congratulatory communiqué entitled "We Went Where They Went."[5] This is an obvious reference to the first of Anti-Racist Action's Points of Unity: "We Go Where They Go. Whenever fascists are organizing or active in public, we're there. We don't believe in ignoring them. Never let the Nazis have the streets!"[6]

It is worth considering why this principle arose: The point of showing up where the Nazis are is to disrupt their organizing and interfere with their recruiting.[7] On August 22, that approach proved counter-productive and even self-defeating, in part because the Right's strategy has come to rely on these same confrontations.

This whole experience can serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of elevating tactics to the level of principles. Street-fighting is a tactic. Sometimes it is the right one. More often it is not. Treating it as a principle makes us inflexible and predictable. We fail to adapt to new political realities, and we rule out other tactics before they even receive due consideration. It makes us less effective than we might otherwise be. Worse, it makes violent confrontation an end in itself, which can have a corrosive influence on the culture of the movement, and can obscure our ends even from ourselves. Once fighting has become the point, winning or losing become secondary considerations.

We can go where they go, but we should ask ourselves why we want to, and we should not be surprised by what we find when we get there.

Tough-sounding slogans will only take us so far, because (as Orwell put it) "sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."[8]


Bio

Kristian Williams is an occasional contributor to Three Way Fight and the author of Gang Politics: Revolution, Repression, and Crime (forthcoming, AK Press).


[1] Tess Riski, "East Portland Proud Boys Rally Devolves into Street Violence with No Police in Sight," Willamette Week, August 22, 2021, https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2021/08/22/east-portland-proud-boys-rally-devolves-into-street-violence-with-no-police-in-sight/; Isabella Garcia, "Far-Right, Antifascist Protesters Fight in NE Portland; Police Refuse to Intervene," Portland Mercury, August 22, 2021, https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2021/08/22/36118630/far-right-antifascist-protesters-fight-in-ne-portland-police-refuse-to-intervene; and, "Shots Fired Near Downtown Protest, Dueling Demonstrators Clash Violently in NE Portland," Oregonian, August 23, 2021, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/08/demonstrators-congregate-at-portland-waterfront.html.

[2] Blair Stenvick and Wm. Steven Humphrey, "Proud Boys Come to Portland, Antifascists Counter-Demonstrate," Portland Mercury, September 26, 2020, https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2020/09/26/29082385/live-blog-proud-boys-come-to-portland-antifascists-counter-demonstrate; Maxine Bernstein, et al., "Portland Protests Bring Out Hundreds to Proud Boys, Opposing Demonstrations Saturday," Oregonian, September 29, 2020, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/09/portland-protests-bring-proud-boys-counter-demonstrators-saturday-live-updates.html; Ryan Haas, et al., "Hate-Group Rally Breaks Up in Portland, Turnout Far Below Expectations," OPB.org, September 26, 2020, https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/26/live-updates-portland-under-state-of-emergency-as-hate-group-holds-rally/; and Zane Sparling, "Proud Boys Rally in Portland Ends, Smaller than Feared," Portland Tribune, September 26, 2020, https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/482137-388914-proud-boys-rally-in-portland-ends-smaller-than-feared.

[3] Shane Burley, "Alt-Right Gangs: A Q&A with Shannon Reid, co-author of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White," Political Research Associates, December 16, 2020, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/12/16/alt-right-gangs.

[4] See: Laura Jedeed, "Making Monsters: Right-Wing Creation of the Liberal Enemy," B.A. Thesis (Reed College: History and Social Sciences, May 2019), https://laurajedeed.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Jedeed-Thesis.pdf.

[5] "We Went Where They Went – 8/11/21 Reportback," Rose City Counter-Info, August 25, 2021, https://rosecitycounterinfo.noblogs.org/2021/08/we-went-where-they-went-8-22-21-reportback.

[6] "The Anti-Racist Action Network's Four Points of Unity," in Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, by Don Hamerquist, et al. (Montréal: Kersplebedeb, 2017), 205.

[7] See, for example: Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism(Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 95; and, Shane Burley, Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (Chico: AK Press, 2017), 257.

[8] George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose," in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, IV: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 124.

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