Hey.
I just wrote and published a long essay that I’ve been terrified of putting out into the world, regardless of how true it is.
It became too long for Substack (there is a character limit for emails after which the message becomes clipped), so I instead posted it at A Beautiful Resistance.
It’s about anarchism and American Antifa, and it’s absolutely something I doubt I’d have had the courage to write without all your support for me here at From The Forests of Arduinna. That being said, if I were a drinker, I’d be drinking right now to not be so fucking scared of likely backlash.
Here is a short excerpt of the essay:
What changed in 2015 was the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and the rise of the “alt-right.” Suddenly, anarchism was back in vogue, but it had a new name: Antifa.
Antifa has quite a lot of similarities to Black Bloc. Antifa doesn’t really exist anymore than you can say that Black Bloc anarchists really exist, yet neither of these statements are fully true. Anyone can be Black Bloc just as anyone can be Antifa, but I can assure you that the anarchists who were forming a Black Bloc in the protests I participated in were very often the same ones each time. We also knew who were the “leaders” of those groups, the ones who were always directing the general movements of the Bloc and making the tactical decisions on when to mask up and when to unmask and blend back in to the crowd.
Antifa is the same way. Antifa has leaders who will of course disavow until the end of their days that they are leaders. Regardless, it is the same groups and same people making the same calls to action, and those groups are headed by the same small group of people each time. Each Antifa Twitter account calls itself a collective, but in each case it’s just two or three people (and often just one person) issuing the proclamations.
Here it’s also worth noting that the infamous article published by Quillette two years ago, as well as Andy Ngo’s work “exposing” Antifa isn’t as false as many Antifa-associated people would have you think. Antifa operates on many series of personal relationships and associations between “nodes.” Those nodes—or really just people— are often working as journalists and self-avowed researchers, while also working closely with Antifa organizers and sometimes as organizers themselves (for instance, running Antifa social media accounts or websites).
It’s also worth noting that Antifa is hardly the first kind of anti-fascist organizing in the United States, but rather a kind of rebranding and co-option of earlier modes of organization. Every Marxist group in the United States (including the Revolutionary Workers Party, The International Socialist Organization, the Socialist Alternative, and the Freedom Socialist Party) organized actions against Nazis and white supremacist groups well before Antifa arose, and often their community calls brought in anarchists such as myself. Antifa, on the other hand, organized less against such larger threats and more against bands like Death In June, using threats and property damage to scare business owners and promoters rather than drawing from organizational strength (because they had none).
The point here is that Antifa is a specifically anarchist organizing tactic, rather than a general leftist one. While other leftist groups saw opposition to fascism as a natural outgrowth of their opposition to capitalism, Antifa’s only purpose is in its name: anti-fascism.
This, of course, leads to all kinds of ideological problems. Socialist groups identify fascism as an immune response of the capitalist order, and have concrete ways of determining whether a movement is fascist or just reactionary. Antifa, lacking a larger political framework, can draw only from its core anarchist ideology for such identification. And of course by the time Antifa fully arose in the middle of the last decade, anarchism had become so intertwined with liberal “anti-oppression” ideology that fascism and oppression became synonymous.
The rise of Trump and the alt-right tied this ideological knot for them, while simultaneously giving anarchists something to make them relevant again. The sudden popularity of alt-right thinkers Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos—themselves riding the coattails of Trump’s nationalist rhetoric—provided exactly the kind of heroic crisis anarchists desperately wanted. Suddenly, there were “fascists” to fight, just like in Catalonia.
Except of course Trump was never a fascist, and neither really were any but a very small handful of the Alt-Right luminaries. What they were was something else entirely, an illiberal force which rejected the anti-oppression framework that anarchists had for years internalized. That same anti-oppression framework now had a new name: intersectionality, or social justice, or what we now call “wokeness.”
Trump and the Alt-Right both rode upon a wave of populist opposition to the cultural and social effects of anti-oppression moralization. This cannot be understated: despite how much we might generally agree with the goals of social justice and anti-oppression work, it was all becoming really fucking ridiculous. The extreme and unhinged nature of anti-oppression work provided exactly what both Trump and the Alt-Right needed for their popularity as well, becoming a kind of shadow twin of the social justice absurdities for which Antifa became the ultimate champion.
Here’s the link for the essay.
And thanks for reading me.
-Rhyd
Thanks for your nuanced reflections on this. As a long-time anarchist I find myself in disagreement on several crucial points, but the conversation is a really important one and I'm glad you're opening it up.
Make no mistake, when you describe your formative experiences with anarchism you're accurately describing a particular North American anarchist milieu that takes a lot of its cues from the toxic subculturalism of the Berlin squat scene, and from a specific kind of punk ethos, but to claim that this is representative of anarchism as a whole strikes me as somewhat tenuous and doesn't map at all closely to my experiences as someone who was politicised at around the same time as you (late 90s anti-globalisation).
To name just one cluster of such experiences, in 2010-11, a friend and I travelled around the world filming a documentary on anarchism. This included connecting with hundreds of anarchist individuals, groups, projects and spaces, everywhere from Brazil to Canada to Switzerland to Zimbabwe. We spoke to veteran FAU anarchists in Uruguay who had gone underground during the dictatorship and were currently heavily involved in community organisation; we met activists in Porto Alegre who were working at the forefront of ecological resistance; we hung out with octogenarians in the Bay who had met Emma Goldman; indigenous mountaintop removal collectives in Arizona; syndicalist organisers across England and Ireland; people who ran grassroots community radio stations and feeding programs in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe... It's a very long list, and I've added extensively to it since those times. Not to mention the hundreds of autonomous social centers, community gardens, infoshops, collective living spaces, hackspaces, libraries and so forth. The anarchist mountaineering federation centered around the five storey building Espace Noire in the Swiss village of St Imier, who have been maintaining a vast hub of activity in the region for over 30 years, and who welcomed over 5 000 anarchists from around the globe for an international gathering several years back, would be amused to find themselves described as a bunch of edgy, morally puritanical black bloccers, as would almost any of the other anarchists we encountered on our extensive travels.
All this to say that when you claim that "socialist organizations were seeing increasing support instead, especially because of their focus on teaching, community support, and their skills at organizing over longer time periods," whereas "anarchism by nature fully precludes such longer term organizing because of its anti-institutionalism and anti-hierarchical arrangements; Marxists, on the other hand, tend to be very good at such organizing," this is an empirical and theoretical falsehood - a well-worn Leninist trope, specifically. There are thousands of anarchist infoshops, free skools, Food Not Bombs networks, eco-activist networks, etc., around the world, and to claim that anarchism precludes a longer-term focus on teaching, community, support, etc., in the face of this is strikingly bizarre. Is the anarchist printing collective in Montevideo, which has been running for several decades and publishes most of the propaganda for left and anarchist groups in Uruguay, not organised enough to maintain their old-school lithographic equipment? How do you think Common Ground managed to generate such a rapid and substantial mutual aid response in New Orleans after Katrina? Anarchists are actually really good at longer-term organising, whatever a pretentious clique of New York insurrectionary elitists may have suggested to you. Ask any of the WSM chapters in Ireland. Ask me and my anarchist friends here in Johannesburg, who tend to do the majority of the hard work and actual organising in the broad left coalitions we sometimes enter into.
In fact, here in South Africa, ironically, it's the socialist organisations that are floundering in irrelevance - oftentimes unable to muster support for any of their projects, splitting into miniscule sects over tedious theoretical and interpersonal disagreements, disseminating analyses that are staggeringly out of touch with the present, and looking, for the most part, like a dubious historical reenactment club that wants to relive the halcyon days of the anti-apartheid struggle or, before that, the October Revolution. Don't get me wrong - I work alongside a fair number of leftists on a daily basis and some of them are doing great things, but it seems pretty clear from where I'm standing that the recent international growth of 'socialism' is the more tenuous - and largely online, or when it's not, nominally 'socialist' democratic progressivism - phenomenon, and that interest in anarchism, along with the formation of new anarchist projects that have long since moved past Starbucks windows, growing rapidly.
I agree completely with you that the creeping moralism of anti-oppression politics as become a real problem, but it's a problem that one can trace everywhere from the liberal democratic center to the ultra-left. If anything, anarchists have been among the most critical of this co-optation of the forms of radical intersectionality they helped develop (a brief perusal of the AK Press catalogue over the past two decades will demonstrate this trajectory) into the narcissistic, digital-centric cancel culture that has pervaded almost all progressive politics. A huge number of the best and earliest critiques of the essentially neoliberal nature of this form of politics have been from anarchists: https://fullopinionism.wordpress.com/
I also agree with most of your critique of the theatre of American Antifa street actions (and German Antifa too, not to mention the ridiculous Antideutsche - the mutual presupposition of enemy and friend there is all too obvious), but that's a separate, if somewhat overlapping, phenomenon to anarchism broadly speaking, and if anything it represents an increasing interest in anarchist politics uncoupled from sufficient contexts to become involved in more useful and sustained anarchist projects (identifying as Antifa on Facebook and going to your first protest doesn't mean you automatically know how to locate your local anarchist community center or ancom group, or even know such things exist; hell, it doesn't even mean you know what anarchism is even about).
I say all this, by the way, as someone who used to agree with the other Aragorn! on most things (albeit perhaps not his enthusiasm for bad faith trolling), and who, like you, balked at the emergence of wokeness and subcultural Antifa posturing in anarchist spaces in the mid-2000s. I just don't see these as problems inherent to anarchism. If anything, they're things anarchism can do, and has done, perfectly fine without.
So please, don't throw the anarchist black diaper baby out with the Antifa bathwater; most anarchist groups and projects look very different to the ones you've been describing, and many of us as comfortably at home with Federici, Marx's analysis of capital and Agamben as we are with the bread book and the Perspectives on Anarchist Theory journal. Many of us are similarly uncomfortable with antifascist apophenia and the easy cancel culture tactic of crying 'ecofascist' or 'cryptofascist' on the internet to quell disagreement.
You're right, I hope, that many people are 'ready to return to the anarchism they first believed in,' but many of us never left.
One small extra point to add to my ludicrously long comment (I had no idea I'd typed that much!):
Perhaps one of the issues here, and you've suggested this in previous essays like your excellent Woke Grift series, is that middle class anarchism looks very different to poor and working class anarchism. My sense is that the kids in their expensive jeans performing anti-oppression theatre were probably a little more economically entitled - humanities students, possibly - than most of the people I described. A simplification, to be sure, but does this ring true at all to you?