anarchist position on tolerance

It isn't simply 'because we disagree with them' but because when fascist and Nazi groups are able to organise openly without getting into trouble from right minded folk then it gives courage to other bigots who want to act on their bigotry but normally wouldn't do so.

I, obviously, don't know if this is what was going through the heads of the people you are referring to but it serves the same purpose. Keeps them off the streets and offers relief from one of the many threats working class communities face. not the biggest threat but a threat all the same.

Are you referring to the guys who got a kicking on the way to a Blood and Honour gig recently(ish)? I would hope that them turning up to the gig bloodied and bruised would have reinforced the need for those muppets to organise secretly and thus be consigned to being fuck all other than a minority fetish club for booze addled social rejects. (Kinda like insurrectionary anarchism )

i've never heard of someone subject to capital punishment re offending...

"Tolerance" is not a concept we should accept uncritically. First of all, it implies something negative about those you are tolerating. In the traditional context, that of various cultures co-existing or whatever, "tolerating" a culture implies that you don't really like them, but you will "tolerate" them anyway. I have heard people describe the term "tolerance" applied to minority/foreign cultures as racist.

Second of all, "tolerance" should not be a general virtue. It depends what you are tolerating. As anarchists we are absolutely intolerant of hierarchy, capitalism, the state, racism, etc. "Tolerance" as a slogan when applied to fascists only means "let's tolerate those who are intolerant to others, because we won't have to deal with the consequences of bigoted fascists thugs being tolerated".

And I absolutely agree with Welshboy's defense of the antifascists. I'm fine with punching nazis in the face. They want to kill me and exterminate me.They either think the murder of my ancestors was awesome or pretend it didn't happen. Tolerating them means letting them organize, letting them be visible. In the long run that means everyone who is not a non-Jewish Northern European is in danger. Therefore, bashing one of those idiots in the face is a lesser evil than allowing a force to grow which will threaten much more extreme violence against non-white, non-christian people.

I think that the classical anarchist idea of tolerance / a universal anti-authoritarianism is a pleasant personal philosophy but for me has nothing to do with revolution.

I am only a libertarian communist / anarchist in the sense that i want the working class to fight directly for communism (not via a state-capitalist detour), and that within the revolutionary organisations that fight for it, members exercise a grassroots control.

On top of this i personally draw anti-racism / anti-sexism / anti-homophobia from the logic that the working class is socially diverse in nature and the in the interest of class solidarity we should not discriminate against any sub-sections of it.

You don't think it's just a particularly stupid or nasty (probably more stupid, unfortunate even) kind of person who dislikes/discriminates against people for stupid reasons?

I mean, after the revolution, there will be no class divisions, so the interests of class solidarity will evaporate, is whateverism ok at that point?

Personally I'm against punching people (even Nazis) in the face out of the blue. If someone has stupid views, lets hear them and mock them. If they are violent, then yeah lets punch them.

If this is liberalism then fuck it, I'm a liberal. People are products of their environment, the brain is a fluid neural network, if the network is fucked up because of the environment punching will not fix it.

@tastybrain I of course share your dislike of Nazis but there are other ways to express lack of tolerance than violence (of course if it comes to it I would not say "turn the other cheek") and I tend to think violence is counterproductive as it makes the divisions between people more concrete, and you end up with not just incidences of violence but a cycle of violence.

Whilst I have quite a bit of sympathy for the 'fuck it, they're nazis' attitude, I think that this emotional response needs to take second place to larger considerations. Is anti-fascist violence an effective tool against fascism? And does it combat it in a way that strengthens working class self organisation and unity? Obviously sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it's no. I think when the fascists actually want to be part of a violent gang culture, the odd attack isn't necessarily going to deter them that much. It's certainly not going to make them change their minds. But if fascists are terrorizing local immigrants and revolutionaries, perhaps with state collusion (as in Greece right now), organised and violent responses are probably part of an appropriate response.

I think a lot of it comes down to your conception of what fascism is. If you see it as an authoritarian tendency within capital that sometimes emerges in order to guarantee the continuation of capitalist social relations, and sometimes is suppressed for the same reason, then anti-fascism can be subsumed into anti-capitalism more generally and anti-fascism as a form of anti-capitalism only becomes salient when capital is using fascism to keep itself going.

However, if you see fascism as a separate force outside of capital (perhaps if you think liberal democracy is the 'natural' form of capitalism) then it is always worth attacking it since it can grow independently of the logic of capital overall.

I'm not sure if you were posting the above tongue-in-cheek, if so please disregard this:
I don't think it's particularly stupid person; a racist may have been exposed to certain circumstances, events and culture that produced their racism. This is an entirely different topic, but I think it's clear that racism arises from material circumstances.*

The 'racists are stupid and nasty' argument naturally leads to liberal 'why can't we all just get along' anti-racism running in the same belated vein as 'anti-classism', rather than (what i consider to be) the much deeper anti-racism (almost) materially generated from the need to struggle together as a class.** Like how in 20th century America the IWW / SP were anti-racist several decades before the Democrats and AFL-CIO.

With the abolition of class, presumably human solidarity / fraternity will replace class solidarity; that is what communism is on a social level... Also the whateverisms will over time be greatly diminished (see *)

*After all, 'immigrants taking our jobs' is a real occurrence (it's just that communists know it is capitalists seeking a cheaper labour supply, not immigrants being cheeky upstarts). Remove these events / material conditions and the cancer will be cut out, but the effects may linger for a while and need to be combated.

**To cover a possible reply along the lines of: "so we should abandon anti-racist activities and focus solely on class struggle?" i will say that anti-racist activities are a means to strengthen class solidarity.

I've used racism as an example, but the above mostly holds for sexism etc.

Back to the question at hand, i don't think randomly punching a fascist achieves much, but i hate the idea that libertarians think it 'wrong'.

@ Harrison, interesting reply thanks, can't respond in full just now though but there's much I can agree with.

Still think it's wrong to punch fascists (anyone) randomly. Perhaps they're in the middle of changing their minds or already changed (it happens) when they get lamped.

I think racism has relative autonomy to capital (to answer RedEd's suggestion but changing fascism to racism) and should be nipped in the bud immediately rather than 'tolerated', fostered and sometimes (quite often) apologized for in certain parts of europe (oh well, ya know, of course they terrorize muslims, they don't have jobs, there young, white, and perceive* that they are getting treated worse than people from other countries. We have all seen this dog shit argument trotted out across europe a lot as of late). This should of course be done politically, but ya know, if you got gangs of guys terrorizing women and children, then it needs to be done at street level. So no, I don't think it should be 'tolerated' one iota. If you are talking about what happened recently, then I really think that it is semantics (an argument I hate making and never usually would) to say that we should tolerate them because we are essentially libertarians. These people preach genocide, racist murders still happen.

I'm a bit on dubious about small groups of self appointed revolutionaries clearing these guys off the street however. I think it should be a broad consensus amongst the white working class and the working class ethnic minorities that they are not going to stand for it.

Now of course this is going to have masses of small print and it is really a case by case situation. Should we lump UKIPers, BNP, EDL and Blood and Honour all in the same category? Probably not. The way some sections of the left band around fascism doesn't make looking at this any easier sometimes either.

*this is always a great populist card trick. This way they don't have to prove what the racists are saying is/not true. The mere perception becomes a reasonable response.

croy, I think that it's more accurate to say that 'I think racism often does stem from explanations of material conditions.'

Their explanations, of course, not ours.

Obviously as a Jew I can't really be totally objective about fascism or Nazis. However, my thinking is this:

Most fascists are cowards. They generally attack minority victims in large gangs, and will target people significantly older/smaller/weaker than them (see for instance the disgusting attacks on immigrants in Russia recently perpetrated by Nazi skinheads. They released many videos on the internet of severe beatings administered by several fascists on middle aged or elderly immigrants.) Since most fascists, although not all, are interested in beating up those who can't really fight back, getting punched will indeed deter many of them. Allowing them to organize publicly or even walk around publicly displaying fascist symbolism emboldens them and makes it more likely they will attack innocent people. It is rare that fascists will actually target revolutionaries; they are more likely to fuck with innocent people. Even if fascists are not yet mounting attacks on revolutionaries and immigrants/minorities, giving them breathing room and "tolerance" for public displays of fascist symbolism will embolden them, allow them to organize more effectively (as secrecy won't be necessary) and will inevitable lead to these kind of attacks. This is the practical activity of fascists everywhere, in America as well as Europe. They don't attack organized groups which are capable of defending themselves but instead victimize random individuals who happen to be the "wrong" ethnicity.

I think most fascists are essentially lost to us. Yes, some individuals change their minds but most fascists are so deeply racist and ignorant that they can not really ever be "converted" to our side. Since there will always be a core group of fascists who will never change their views, I would advocate totally unprovoked violence against them, simply because it will drive them deeper underground and not allow them to attract followers. Whether or not a fascist is actively organizing violent attacks, allowing them to walk around in public wearing a swastika or whatever will increase the likelihood of such racist attacks in the future (btw, if they change their beliefs they won't wear the regalia or go to fascist gigs, so that clearly wasn't the case) Since most of these people are never going to come over to our side politically, at least in the short term, any potential "harm" we do by beating up some "innocent" fascist is justified by the decreased likelihood of racist attacks.

Just a quick answer to croy, there are material conditions, but I don't think it is reducible to in any clear linear way. Tasty, I will give yours a read when i got more time

Tolerance n the US has taken on some liberal middle class meaning to tolerate the people who aren't like them (that being white and having better access to the means of production than a lot of workers). To tolerate implies there's something wrong with the person you're 'tolerating'. "Tolerance" when it comes to gender or race is silly I'd fall on the side of acceptance rather than tolerance.

As far as dissenting political or religious beliefs I'd say tolerate it until it gets to the point where it threatens to be counterrevolutionary in the sense that it can actually manifest as a minority once again controlling the majority.

An example would be (post revolution) if "free" market capitalists wanted to get together and figure out which one of them will be the wage slave and which one will be the capitalist they can play their little game of monopoly but as soon as it threatens to force people into wage slavery (in society at large) it would be time to not 'tolerate' their little quest to accumulate capital. Workers would be in the right to defend ourselves from capitalists attempting to reestablish a hierarchical society based on exploitation/wage slavery/rent/interest.

As far as tolerating NAZI's I'd preach 'tolerance' to them seeing they'll probably never accept minorities (non whites) in their communities. I might even say the same thing to them if they want to live outside of collectively controlled industrial society (as with the "free market" capitalists).... let them fuck off and go at it on their own but as soon as their ideology threatens the majority of workers then it's time to do something about it. I'd say pretty much off the bat their ideology threatens the majority of workers so...

The difference is we're right and they're wrong.

while you may disagree with Tasty it is pretty knee jerky to say he is using the same argument as state . States justify their violence through the so called 'legitimate monopoly of violence'. The violence is then delegated to a professional body (the police, the army etc). Tasty is not arguing that.

The thing about the red and black flag is croy, is anarchists have never been responsible for a holocaust. Even on a smaller level, anarchists have not been responsible for murder for over 100 years. Skinheads still kill people today. On tolerating nazi symbols etc. You know when the BNP won all those seats in Barking a few years ago? Within week (might even have been the same day) a young Afghani man was found murdered draped in a union jack. I can't say that has happened with a red and black.

Perhaps what anarchists need to do is infiltrate the main neonazi organizations as agent provocateurs and get them to perform a hopeless coup d'etat, thereby turning both the state and the public against them!