A question about violence

If you ask me any fascist is fair game for violence as they intend to inflict violence on those they dislike. Conflict and violence is a core tenet of what they believe in and when they are not actually harming people they are whipping up hate for others to harm people.
As for the other point about war, I'm not sure I can answer it properly as it's probably rather complicated but I'll say this-
I think those two wars are perhaps different, in that it would have been easier to support the uprising against Saddam in 1991 and doing that would have been a better way of dealing with him- but that didn't happen. As you say, Hitler declared war on the US first, where as Saddam had no intention of picking a fight with them, he didn't attack america. However, an ally of Nazi Germany did attack the US. I guess the US could have intervened in some way against nazi germany or the spanish fascists but they didn't do that. I personally think the best way of dealing with these fascist regimes would be to support their enemies at points where they were weak but the US had vested interest in not doing that in both cases. I guess I come across here as somewhat of a believer in my enemies' enemy is my friend, which really I'm not but what I've stated is the only way I can think of dealing with these regimes effectively. In the case of Iraq it is easier to do as there is an actual uprising to get behind. In the case of germany, the nazis would have had to be dealt with either before or just after they gained power, something an anti-fascist Red Army could have perhaps dealt with had Lenin not died, or had Stalin not taken over. We don't know what would have happened though. I'm not a pacifist, I think violence is a necessary part of struggle, especially when it comes to fascists of all types.

The shenanigans of a few people on the streets, smashing windows or punching white nationalists, pales in comparison to the violence inflicted on the working class daily in the form of wage slavery and unemployment as well as historically with the violent US labor movement and anti-labor campaigns that destroyed most of the socialist and communist parties and organizations. Random senseless violence and cocktail-throwing is usually all that dishonest or misinformed people associate with anarchism, and that is mostly for propaganda reasons (never do they talk about Food Not Bombs, squatters taking over mansions for the homeless, etc.) It should not distract from the fact that we live in a violent capitalist system supported by state power that is responsible for all kinds of human degradation, misery and deaths, a perverse system in which (according to Oxfam) just eight people own the same wealth as half the world's population, or in which clothing and food is routinely destroyed or thrown away because it's less profitable to give away.

That said, I don't formally endorse punching wannabe Nazis in the face, but I don't think people should just stand by while the Spencer types capture political power and begin implementing their agendas, as they already have with Steven Bannon. I think people should organize themselves to oppose these ultra right-wingers, only using violence as a last resort and in self-defense. Then again, I wouldn't cry myself to sleep if Spencer happens to get smacked in the face and is prevented from talking about that goddamn frog.

zylas

Hello, I am new here and I'd like to see your point of view on violence and antifascism, especially in the wake of recent events. (By the way, this isn't really related, but I just read the introductory guide and it explained the basic concepts better than anything I read before, especially the relationship between the state and capital, really good job on that)

First, the Richard Spencer incident. I am not at all morally opposed to the punch itself, and it felt very cathartic to see the nazi driven off. But how practical is it? I know that he himself said that they "can't have a public movement" if they're in constant fear of such incidents, but should we take the nazi's word for it? He knows what he says is publicly available, so it seems foolish to genuinely, openly say how best to oppose them. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit by assuming some kind of reverse psychology on his part, but it seems to me open violence like that scares people and makes them more sympathetic to him.

Well the good news is we don't have to take their word for it at all there's a long history of violence working against fascism. The original Fascist movement the Italian Black Shirts were successfully opposed by a militant alliance the Arditi Popolo, however certain political parties that were in the group decided to abandon violence for elections and debates.

In the UK in the seventies the fourth largest party was the National Front, but despite being literal Hitler worshippers who were linked to a series of assaults, arsons and murder the opposition from the other political parties ended with Labour and Conservative governments compromising with them. Passing more anti immigrant controls and racist measures.

The NF were eventually driven out by a coalition of local minority communities forming defence groups and the largely Anarchist and Communist militant street fighting group Anti-Fascist Action.

In regards to your second point anyone who supports Fascism out of sympathy was a fascist to begin with. They just needed a kick to get them to grasp that thorny branch. So no real loss there.

Secondly, on a larger scale, waging war on fascist, totalitarian regimes. Recently I saw some left wing people denounce Americans who during WW II opposed invading Nazi Germany, calling them nazi sympathisers. On the other hand, the Left was pretty unanimously opposed to the Iraq war. Saddam Hussein's regime was responsible for deaths oh hundreds of thousands, they used poisonous gas on Kurds. Now I know this isn't the reason USA invaded Iraq, but can't the same be said of Nazi Germany? They attacked only after years of war, Stalin's urging and after Hitler declared war on USA in the first place. Is the difference in approach between the two based on scale and power relation?

No its a question of politics. There were left wing opposition to WWII and leftist groups that supported the overthrow of Saddam, though both were in the minority. The American Communist party supported WWII because that was what the USSR wanted and most of the other leftist groups had embraced patriotism to a greater or lesser degree, and the naked aggression of the Axis meant it was easier to push the war as one of defence.

The same thing happened in WWI where most European socialist parties having spent decades denouncing war as imperialistic murder, suddenly voted for war in 1914, because the other side were the dangerous aggressor, not them. In the USA on the other hand the socialists were more vocally anti-war and the sentiment was popular because the war was viewed as a European affair in which America would be sticking its nose in needlessly.

With the 2003 invasion that wasn't the case, nobody really believed in the WMD threat and the regime had largely been defanged after the first war. Basically it was a textbook case of an imperial war.

The war against the Nazis wasn't fought to defeat Nazism. If it had been ideological then they wouldn't have left Spain under fascist rule and put Nazis back into positions of power in Gemrany and ITaly and other countries.

States use violence to advance their interests. Saddam committed genoicide and human rights abuses but there are plenty of others who have been allowed to do the same, including Saddam himself, when it suited.

A nazi getting a punch allows a bunch of free speech fetishists to get worked up about dangerous anarchists and justifies their own choices. I dislike the idea of escalating street violence on one level as the right generally have cops and the state on their side so we might just be authorising violence against us (not that any such qualms would hold back the right from using violence. Spencer himself probably not because he's a self-publicist looking to make money, not an idealist)
It's a tricky question, but if you can oppose fascist organising then it's a good thing.

jef's right, it's a tough question

jef costello

A nazi getting a punch allows a bunch of free speech fetishists to get worked up about dangerous anarchists and justifies their own choices. I dislike the idea of escalating street violence on one level as the right generally have cops and the state on their side so we might just be authorising violence against us

also, it gives rightwingers an excuse to (yet again) make themselves out to be victims

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/24/the_nra_s_wayne_lapierre_at_cpac_the_left_wants_to_kill_you_so_buy_guns.html

otoh, rightwingers seem to believe they alone have the bottle to resort to violence, and congratulate themselves on it. so when a spencer get slammed, it puts them on the back foot. i really believe that if fascists/rightwingers were made to know that they would be met on their own terms it would deter them better than liberal pontification. i'm pining a bit as we in the states scarcely have the history that you have in the UK with this.

Other people have given good responses, so I just wanted to say something brief here:
zylas

Maybe I'm giving him too much credit by assuming some kind of reverse psychology on his part, but it seems to me open violence like that scares people and makes them more sympathetic to him.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who has got into fascism through seeing a fascist get punched. Otherwise you would think quite a few people might get into it through watching Indiana Jones films.

On a more serious note, a big thing driving white nationalism and these kind of fascist groups is the myth of racial superiority, machismo and being the master race. Getting publicly decked is definitely offputting in this regard.

Critiques of anti-fascism when it turns into cross-class co-operation with the liberal state have to be balanced vs. grassroots opposition to fascism (whether Cable Street or or the protests against Milo at Berkeley). It's quite possible to be opposed to liberal anti-fascism and enjoy watching Richard Spencer getting punched, these aren't contradictory.

Mike Harman

Critiques of anti-fascism when it turns into cross-class co-operation with the liberal state have to be balanced vs. grassroots opposition to fascism (whether Cable Street or or the protests against Milo at Berkeley). It's quite possible to be opposed to liberal anti-fascism and enjoy watching Richard Spencer getting punched, these aren't contradictory.

^A common response.

But who in your mind has done more to create this atmosphere of xenophobia, and undermine class solidarity: the average, double-digit mass of balding, flag-waving, fascist grunts, plastered with Celtic cross tattoos, with the combined intelligence of a spoon; or the respectable, professional [predominantly] white, middle-class journalists of newspapers like the Express, the Mail, or The Sun, sitting in their Central London offices?

It strikes me that today's militant antifascists are effectively doing the state's job for them. Whether through targetting neo-nazis that are already on the state's radar, or glorifying and propagandising on behalf of the Kurdish front in the Syrian imperialist war.

Grappling with the question of white nationalism vs liberalism.

From what I understand, white nationalists believe that whites should maintain domination of society over all other races. How does this differ from centrist liberalism, other than the fact that white nationalists are stupid enough to actually verbalize their intentions?

Of course the most obvious proof of liberalism's white nationalist intentions is its history with support for policing/Clinton's notorious Crime Reform bill. However, maybe even thinking on a wider scale we can consider how liberals view the non-white world. Liberals have always sought to keep the global south impoverished.

Obama supported TPP for the explicit reason that he believed the US should maintain economic control over East Asia in order to stop Chinese expansion. He claimed that US human rights policies were better than China's so maintaining US hegemony was actually a progressive move.

Similarly, neoliberal ideologues Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and Alan Greenspan crafted the draconian bailouts of the East Asian economies during the 1997 financial panic there. The terms of the bailouts were so harsh that it continues to force these economies to hold massive dollar reserves, thereby running trade surpluses when they should be running deficits. The economies have slowed growth considerably. How many lives has this cost? Similar to white nationalism it has maintained the domination of the white race over the Asian economies, but it's couched in academic language so it's not possible to denounce Summers/Rubin/Greenspan as white nationalists.

In short, who really deserves to punched? If Spencer why not Greenspan?

Thing about Milo is he had a proven track record of targeting students at universities he went to. Perfectly reasonably to attack Milo in name of self-defense. Of course, the police and the immigration authorities have done much worse things, but they're too powerful to confront openly. When it boils down to it seems like really the question is about power, i.e who can we target and win against rather than a greater moral question as it is often discussed in terms of.

But who in your mind has done more to create this atmosphere of xenophobia, and undermine class solidarity: the average, double-digit mass of balding, flag-waving, fascist grunts, plastered with Celtic cross tattoos, with the combined intelligence of a spoon;
or the respectable, professional [predominantly] white, middle-class journalists of newspapers like the Express, the Mail, or The Sun, sitting in their Central London offices?

See the problem here is by trying to show how these two groups reproduce the same ideology, you're inserting a dichotomy between them that's not there. Your classist (and ableist - 'combined intelligence of a spoon', really?) view of fascists matches the one which the liberal media up until recently relied upon to distinguish itself from them.

Richard Spencer did a fashion shoot for liberal magazine Mother Jones (and several other examples). "Meet the dapper white nationalist riding the Trump wave". . He also did a masters thesis on Adorno at Duke University.

The New Statemen's Laurie Penny was with Milo's entourage at Berkeley when his speech got shut down, and has been doing crap and not-very-critical interviews with Milo, Tommy Robinson and etc. since about 2012.

Berkeley Republicans probably wear blazers or some other horrible preppy crap too.

Now I think John Harris, Polly Toynbee, not to mention Katie Hopkins and similar are very responsible for the rise of xenophobia and islamophobia, then there's the BBC's obsession with UKIP, most of the parliamentary Labour party etc. However, there's a spectrum, and like Soapy says we should be prepared to no-platform 'liberals' if there's the capacity to do so (or at least not invite dogwhistlers like Paul Mason onto supposedly radical platforms as has been happening recently).

This isn't my area of focus, but "doing the state's work" is just laziness.

Aside from the sheer exhilarating joy of seeing Richard Spencer getting punched in the face, or seeing Milo flee in fear, it's without nuance to dismiss these people as mere boot boys. There's a whole range of these people, and as Soapy says white supremacy is an ideology inculcated within liberalism. You can't debate with these people, reason with them and if some of them are threatening physically threatening people then bless the folks who are willing to take them on and beat them down in the streets. Don't allow them to believe that they are tolerable in any way.

It's got to be pretty undeniable at this point that we are talking about being opposed to freedom of speech for pretty much the whole of Western society.

If the idea is that fascists can't be tolerated because they can't be reasoned with, then by that same token liberals surely cannot be tolerated either.

If the argument is that fascists deserve to be attacked because they advocate violence against us or people we know, well then liberals and pretty much everyone on this planet deserves to be attacked for advocating for a whole host of issues, most of all the continuing existence of capitalism, which is truly "horror without end".

This brings up the question of do we, as anarchists, care about free speech? But maybe a more important question is can freedom of speech even exist within capitalism when we consider that people get their information directly or indirectly from the media, and the media simply parrots the ruling class and maintaining the status quo?

The very concept of freedom of speech itself is rife with contradictions. If the NYT newspaper editor rejects an op-ed because he disagrees with it, would anyone consider that attacking freedom of speech? Of course not, but in reality when the mass media fail to publish opinions that are contrary to their interests they are in fact attacking free speech. So the term "free speech" is itself loaded"

But if we take our platform to its logical conclusion, where do we draw the line? Do we consider pretty much everyone on this planet worthy of being violently attacked for espousing their beliefs? That is what we are talking about. The answer is complicated but let's be honest with what we are saying.

Hmm that's making it more a moral question about who individually deserves a punch in the face. Don't think it's useful to talk in hypotheticals.

There are several cases where 'liberals' ability to speak/appear publicly has been disrupted by anarchists/communists. An obvious one is the 1968 DNC: https://libcom.org/history/chicago-1968

There are two separate incidents (at least) of Labour politician John Prescott getting attacked in public. He got a bucket of water chucked over him in 1998 at the Brit Awards by Chumbawumba ("That's for the Liverpool Dockers!") and egged by a farm worker in 2001 when out campainging (over conditions for farm workers).

It's worth talking about the limitations of street anti-fascism (i.e. whether 100 people turning up to oppose an EDL march is more or less of a priority than 100 people turning up to stop a deportation flight). But that's not a theoretical question about violence but a practical question about organising and priorities.

Mike Harman

Hmm that's making it more a moral question about who individually deserves a punch in the face. Don't think it's useful to talk in hypotheticals

Not about hypotheticals more about having something reasonable to say when someone brings up the subject of "free speech".

I guess one could say if the 1968 DNC protests were ok then why not shutting down fascist meetings

The SPGB has been the victim of violent hooliganism, from the Right but from the Left too, with its meetings broken up, in the past, in the name of "socialism" and "democracy"

It has held open and public meetings with fascists and neo-fascists, patriots and nationalists, class enemies and class collaborators and in all those encounters we have never heard of socialist ideas being kicked into the heads of our opponents.

Nor have we really witnessed any real decline in those anti-socialists or their nefarious influence by street fighting and no-platformism. They merely shift labels and causes.

Our fellow-workers when in despair and desperation and disillusionment are receptive to all manner of ideas and solutions...from authoritarian left-wing to totalitarian right-wing.

Workers offer a hearing and present an audience to the enemies of socialism, both wings, because our own voice is not sufficiently vocal to bestow hope or confidence.

Let's concentrate on building up receptive listeners than expressing our impotence and frustration with futile and ineffective gestures.

Yes, ajjohnstone gets closer to the truth.

Mike Harman

See the problem here is by trying to show how these two groups reproduce the same ideology, you're inserting a dichotomy between them that's not there.

I'm not doing anything of the sort. Indeed, that's what the antifascists do. The point I made above was precisely that militant (i.e. direct-action) antifascists have no means of responding to the broad wave of xenophobic propaganda that comes from the mainstream, "respectable" bourgeoisie (e.g. its press), and if one is to be an antifascist, rather than a mere street-fighter, then surely one also has to challenge the fascist drift at the level of ideas and politics (fascism, after all, fixes itself upon the acquisition of political power)? And this entails a movement similar to the [failed] antifascist fronts of old - equipped with both street milita and political front.

But today's militant antifascists are obsessed with direct action tactics - as such, they're just as useless as the liberal antifascists they claim to differentiate themselves from.

I believe that the choice we're confronted with today is not fascism or antifascism?, but socialism or barbarism?. And those who stress the former choice do so at the expense of the latter.

Unfortunately, there are some on here who believe that sticking the word 'proletarian', 'radical' or 'socialist' in front of any old cause transubstantiates its character, whereby the movement in question suddenly becomes worthy of communist support simply because it mutters something resembling our own language.

What's the difference between supporting antifascism on the basis of the horrors of the crimes of Nazism, and supporting antiimperialism on the basis of the horrors of Britain imperialism? Or perhaps we ought to differentiate between militant antiimperialism and liberal antiimperialism?

The problem with fascists is that they will in an organized way come to your meetings and beat you up, bomb your buildings, stab you on your way home, shoot you to death outside your door, terrorize public gatherings that are against their agenda etc.

Much of this discussion misses the point, liberal governments are a completely different problem, so are the police and the military.

Are the alt right capable of the above? I have no idea.

Cooked

The problem with fascists is that they will in an organized way come to your meetings and beat you up, bomb your buildings, stab you on your way home, shoot you to death outside your door, terrorize public gatherings that are against their agenda etc.

So will the liberal state. For example, the US governments reaction to the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and '70s. Another example that comes to mind is the police bombing of the MOVE organization house and it's occupants in Philadelphia in 1985.

ajjohnstone

we have never heard of socialist ideas being kicked into the heads of our opponents.

Well, this is an odd way of describing the goal of anti-fascism; the point isn't to convert fascists to socialism through violence, it's to disrupt their ability to organise politically.

Craftwork

if one is to be an antifascist, rather than a mere street-fighter, then surely one also has to challenge the fascist drift at the level of ideas and politics

I think this is a criticism that gets leveled at every group that uses direct action tactics and it always follows the same structure: isolate the activity/element of an activity you don't like, then ask how that activity/element could possibly ever in isolation be politically productive.

So, yeah, sure, there are some who, imo, focus too much on the physical force side of anti-fascism. But that's not a criticism of anti-fascism itself, it's a criticism of a particular approach to it. In reality though, anti-fascists often are involved in more than just street violence.. AFA's 'physical and ideological opposition', for one, or from the AFN's how to set up an anti-fascist group:

Do you simply want to support AFN street actions? Or might you want to get involved in relevant networks, such as migrant solidarity groups, or even host community meetings? There are AFN groups that do just one, some or all of these things.

There's obviously more to say but, you know, bed time.. ;)

If the idea is that fascists can't be tolerated because they can't be reasoned with, then by that same token liberals surely cannot be tolerated either.

Just on this, I think we have to differentiate from establishment liberals - whose ties to capital, the state, white supremacy, etc make it pointless for us to even engage with them - and your average, garden variety progressive Democratic voter of whom we should be building dialog and solidarity.

There's no such distinction with fascists. A fascist in power or a fascist in the street is an ideological racist willing to employ violence against immigrants, the left, whoever.

What I'm saying is that without qualification, I think we need be careful before we go around declaring that liberals can be equated with fascists.

Chilli Sauce

If the idea is that fascists can't be tolerated because they can't be reasoned with, then by that same token liberals surely cannot be tolerated either.

Just on this, I think we have to differentiate from establishment liberals - whose ties to capital, the state, white supremacy, etc make it pointless for us to even engage with them - and your average, garden variety progressive Democratic voter of whom we should be building dialog and solidarity.

There's no such distinction with fascists. A fascist in power or a fascist in the street is an ideological racist willing to employ violence against immigrants, the left, whoever.

What I'm saying is that without qualification, I think we need be careful before we go around declaring that liberals can be equated with fascists.

Think you sorta missed the point, I was showing how justifications for attacking fascists could be used to attack anyone of pretty much any political persuasion