Tag: definitions

Honestly, we understand why you are confused.

Here’s the simple explanation: Antifa refers specifically to people who are attempting to prevent fascists from spreading fascism. Antifa calls this “deplatforming” and it can involve a variety of tactics, including getting fascists kicked off social media, making noise so they can’t be heard when they are speaking in public, or using moderate (nonlethal) violence. It’s that last detail that has fascists, cryptofascists (fascists who deny being fascists), and (possibly) conservatives really freaked out — if you try to spread fascism, some antifa might punch you in the face.

There’s a much longer explanation, but if you get confused, you should really refer back to the simple explanation because that’s the important part.

The first antifa movements were in pre-Nazi Germany, where many people, including communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and even liberals, saw the danger of fascism and met Nazis in the street to try to stop them before things got out of hand. Unfortunately, there were two separate anti-fascist groups and they did not get along: Eiserne Front (Iron Front) was first to form, led by social democrats, trade unionists, and liberals. Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action) was next, led by the communists. Antifascist Action and Iron Front were formal organizations (not like today’s antifa). Today’s antifa generally (but not always!) takes the name antifa from the nickname of Antifascist Action, but takes the symbol (circle with three arrows pointing down and left) from the Iron Front. Had they been able to get along, things might have turned out better, but they were not, and ultimately the Weimar Republic chose to side with the Nazis due to their fear of communism.

Here’s where the confusion happens: Antifa is short for anti-fascist, but not all anti-fascists are antifa. In fact, all good people are anti-fascists. When someone asks us if the Mid-Missouri JBGC is “antifa” we say “no” because we don’t do the specific things that antifa does — we do not attempt to deplatform fascists, and we would not initiate violence or even escalate a situation toward violence. The law explicitly says that antifa’s activities are illegal (because US law says it is legal for fascists to generally advocate for genocide), and our club only participates in legal activities. (We do, however, recognize that there is nothing unethical about antifa’s approach to fascism.) If you hear about an anti-fascist organization, like ours, odds are it is not antifa.

The Trump administration is clearly fascistic, so it is no surprise that they oppose antifa and have attempted to criminalize “membership” in antifa — even though antifa is not a formal organization, and therefore has no members. They are also trying to blame antifa for arson and other acts of property destruction, but when vandals have been caught, law enforcement has never been able to connect them to antifa. They’ve tried to blame antifa for violence at protests, but when the police stop physically attacking protesters, the violence magically goes away — a good indication that it is the police that cause most protest violence. This follows a long history of right-wing groups intentionally misrepresenting the left and should come as no surprise. What’s surprising is that so many Americans believe these accusations.

There are rare exceptions to the rule that antifa are not organized; those exist in regional antifa groups that are explicitly organized and proud of their deplatforming mission. The most famous of these would be Rose City Antifa in Portland, OR. However, even in Portland, most of the people engaging in deplatforming of fascists will not be formal members of Rose City Antifa. If you visit their website, you’ll see that they explicitly say that their mission is to deplatform fascists. If you haven’t heard the name of your local antifa organization, then you probably don’t have one in your area. Columbia, MO does not have any kind of organized antifa; in fact, we don’t think it even has any unorganized antifa.

Antifa are not terrorists. I suppose a lot of fascists out there are pretty terrified of getting punched in the face, but that doesn’t fit our standard definition of terrorism, which requires that someone dies or at least might have died from the attack. I can’t emphasize this enough: Antifa specifically means people who try to deplatform fascists (not kill them), so if someone is a terrorist (attempting mass murder), then what they are doing is not “antifa” because that is not what antifa does. It is theoretically possible for an anti-fascist to be a terrorist — but a recent analysis of terrorism in the US found that no one had died from left-wing terrorism in the last 26 years (which was the limit of their study).

In a desperate attempt to define the left as “terrorists” some analysts (including the one linked above) have included property damage in their definition of terrorism, which is absurd, and some attempt to conflate leftism with Black people (in short, that’s a mistake). Regarding left-wing terrorism, the primary concern among US law enforcement is that they might at any moment start doing terrorism — it’s a delusion based on our culture’s villainizing of the left.

It is the right wing that regularly produces terrorists. That includes — but is not limited to — white supremacists (like both the Oklahoma City bomber and Charles Manson), religious extremists (like the 9/11 attackers and people who attack abortion clinics), misogynists (like the guy who blew his hand off making a bomb to kill “hot cheerleaders” or the Sutherland Springs, TX church shooting), and homophobes (Pulse Nightclub shooting, Upstairs Lounge attack).

Antifa is rarely organized and there is no national or international antifa organization. While antifa are anti-fascist, most anti-fascists are not antifa and anyone who is opposed to fascism is an anti-fascist. What’s important in identifying antifa is that they actively deny fascists a platform for advocating for fascism; antifa actions may include non-lethal violence. Most anti-fascists do not use violence to deny fascists a platform because doing so is illegal.

RELATED LINKS

The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States — Center for Strategic and International Studies (June 2020). This study includes the popular conflation of property damage with terrorism.

The Green Scare: How a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat — Alleen Brown, The Intercept (March, 2019)

Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the ‘war on drugs’ decades ago — Alex Lockie, Business Insider (July 2019)

Antifaschistische Aktion — Wikipedia

Iron Front — Wikipedia

Incitement to Genocide — Wikipedia. International law says that incitement to genocide is illegal, but US law allows it for the most part in the interest of free speech (only incitement of a specific act of violence is strictly illegal); even if incitement to genocide were illegal in the US, antifa’s deplatforming would still be vigilantism, and thus illegal.

The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States — testimony of Dale L. Watson (Executive Assistant Director, Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence Division, FBI) before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (February, 2002). I’ve included this because it illustrates the fact that “domestic left-wing terrorism” does not exist in the USA. Notice how they conflate both property damage and rebellion against the US occupation of Puerto Rico with domestic terrorism in order to create the impression that there is a domestic terrorism threat from the left.

America’s Armed, Antisemitic Far Right Is Prepping to Defend Trump in November — Alexander Reid Ross, Haaretz (August, 2020)

Trump is calling protesters who disagree with him terrorists. That puts him in the company of the world’s autocrats — Angela Dewan, CNN

This post is part of our series defining words. Defining words might seem trivial, but one of the most effective strategies authoritarians employ is redefining what specific words mean. The most famous example of this might be when the Nazis tried to redefine socialism. At the time, socialism was extremely popular, but just like today, most people weren’t paying enough attention to really understand it. That made it easy for the Nazis to add the word “national” to create “national socialism” which sounds like a kind of socialism even though it is exactly the opposite. The confusion they created didn’t just help the Nazis of the 1930’s — it continues to help authoritarians today.

anarchism: belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion

Google’s online dictionary

It seems like every day another US politicians is using the word “anarchists” as a pejorative, and in fact, for most Americans, anarchy is synonymous with chaos and destruction. But for anarchists, anarchy is exactly the opposite: Anarchy is order. As an outsider to the left, I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last 4 years trying to make sense of the different kinds of leftists, and I’ve concluded that anarchists believe in the purest form of the leftist ideals of democracy, justice and liberty, based on belief in the innate goodness of human beings.

Anarchists believe that human beings are capable of building a society where everyone is treated with respect and dignity, and is able to get what they need to excel in life. The word literally means “no government”; anarchists believe that once people have established a culture of good, no formal hierarchy (including government) would be necessary. Importantly, all leftists share roughly this same end goal, but disagree with how to get there. The anarchists’ method for working toward these goals is by living their values and thus nudging our culture to be a little bit better, bit by bit — this is completely voluntary change without force or compulsion.

Is this utopian? Perhaps. But what is the alternative? How can we expect to make the world better if we believe that people are innately bad? If that’s true then there’s no government structure that will make the world better because all governments are made of people — and all alternate forms of authority and organization (like markets or corporations) are made up of people as well. The only rational approach is to assume people can be good and try to find ways to free them from systems that debase them, slowly working toward something better. The goal isn’t to attain a utopia, but rather to work toward something better that more closely resembles it. Things can’t be better if we surrender to dystopian assumptions about the nature of people.

Democracy means the people have control of government; the anarchist approach is to give the people so much power that there is no division between the people and the government, and so there essentially is no government. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats believe in democracy; at least the Republicans admit to this. Both parties want a group of elites to hold power, and then the rest of us may only appeal to them to do the right thing. Anarchists understand that electoral power is just one kind of power — and a weak part at best. They want to democratize all kinds of power but also help people develop the ethical and technical skills necessary to wield that power.

Anarchists believe we are capable of administering justice among ourselves, particularly if we form coherent communities where we know one another. Because they believe in the innate goodness of human beings, they are willing to go the extra mile to redeem people who have failed their communities, instead of immediately tossing them in the trash as our current society does. Anarchists understand that punitive systems of justice only make things worse.

I would break an anarchist view of liberty into three components: First, yes, you should be free to do what you want (assuming it doesn’t hurt other people). Second, the responsibility that comes with freedom is responsibility to your community. Third, the best way to achieve your own freedom and respect your responsibility to your community is to take personal responsibility for your own actions and power. That means that you willingly work with your community to make amends if you make a mistake that harms someone else. Anarchists accept the burden of freedom, so they are able to take democracy seriously.

Two general methods anarchists use to build a better world are mutual aid and dual power.

Mutual aid is a community working together to help itself. Different individuals might have time, skills or resources necessary to address an issue, and each person provides what they can and, hopefully, receives what they need. When it is working optimally, mutual aid results in the same people both providing help and receiving help.

Community defense is another way of describing mutual aid; it refers to defense against any kind of destruction that might threaten a community (not just violence). Because it is a form of mutual aid, it works best when the entire community participates. Instead of a model of defense where “sheep dogs” protect “sheep” from “wolves”, it is a model where everyone is important and participating in their own defense. No one is above or below anyone else. For example, instead of relying on FEMA to rescue people in a flood, anarchists would organize the community to rescue itself; community members with time, skills and/or resources would make sure that everyone else in the community was safe. Community defense is more specific than mutual aid because it implies an attack.

For anarchists, dual power means identifying institutions that are oppressive and undemocratic and building functionally similar organizations that are controlled by the community. In terms of food, for example, if all the food in your community is sold by one grocery store that is owned by an out-of-state corporation with a global supply chain, then anarchists would want to build another method of food distribution based on food grown by local farmers and distributed by members of the community.

All these ideas are obviously good in both a practical and moral sense, yet anarchists have been consistently vilified. There’s a simple explanation for why the media, both political parties, and every other major system of power dismisses anarchy, portrays it as crazy talk, and conflates it with things like violence, vandalism, and chaos: Anarchism is pure democracy and democracy is a threat to any power system. This has been true historically as well: Every authoritarian system in modern times has attacked anarchists.

Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club has members of various political identities, but works based on anarchist organizing principles, which means operating without a formal hierarchy (although individuals do take on specific responsibilities), and always trying to find the ethical solution to problems based on an optimistic view of humanity. We’ve found that though organizing this way certainly has challenges and requires extra work, it is well worth it.

RELATED MATERIAL

If you are a Christian, you might be interested in Elbert Hubbard’s 1939 book Jesus Was an Anarchist which is available as a free download.

Existential Comics has devoted quite a few comics to historical anarchists, with a recurring punchline that accurately reflects how authoritarian governments react to real anarchists. Here are two of my favorites:

– Anarchist Organizing

– Anarchy in the UK

Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! by David Graeber

If you’d like to watch a video of anarchism explained by a respected expert, then I recommend this video of Noam Chomsky (2013; 36 minutes):

This post is part of our series defining words. Defining words might seem trivial, but one of the most effective strategies authoritarians employ is redefining what specific words mean. The most famous example of this might be when the Nazis tried to redefine socialism. At the time, socialism was extremely popular, but just like today, most people weren’t paying enough attention to really understand it. That made it easy for the Nazis to add the word “national” to create “national socialism” which sounds like a kind of socialism even though it is exactly the opposite. The confusion they created didn’t just help the Nazis of the 1930’s — it continues to help authoritarians today.

The words “liberal” and “neoliberal” are being redefined in the same way today. If you talk to a self-described conservative, they’ll tell you that “liberal” is a synonym for “socialist” which is a synonym for “communist” (not true). And if you ask them to define “neoliberal”, they’ll tell you it’s the same as a liberal but even more “communist”. Again, that’s not what it means.

Liberal

The ideas we call liberalism today started out in England in the late 1600’s. They still had a king at that time, and though most people didn’t want to get rid of the monarchy, they did want normal people to have some rights, so they created a constitution that limited the power of the king, declared that the elected government was a higher authority than the king, and created a bill of rights. They still had a monarchy, which is a form of authoritarianism, and the elected government wasn’t very democratic at all, but this was a huge step up.

So that’s how liberalism started: Just the people deciding that normal individuals should have some rights. Liberalism has some inherent flaws. For one thing, it easily coexists with authoritarianism – the idea is that if the people have a list of rights, actual power can remain within a single class of people instead of being shared by all. In addition, it only sees government as a source of tyranny and doesn’t recognize the fact that there are other types of power that can by tyrannical.

Since its invention, conservatives have been opposed to liberalism because they like the traditional form of society. When you give people the option to do whatever they want, a significant number of them will not behave the way tradition would like. Conservatives actually liked the monarchy – they really believed the rule of the king was ordained by God and they were terribly offended that the law would shift power away from God. Modern British conservatives still like the monarchy, which is why British taxpayers spent $86 million on supporting the royal family in the previous fiscal year, even though the British royal family is worth around $88 billion.

This tension between individual rights and tradition exists in the US as well, with liberals asking for individuals to have unlimited rights to self-expression and religious belief, and attempting to establish truly equal treatment under the law, while conservatives only want the freedom to express traditional ideas and practice their traditional religions, and support different levels of protection for different classes of Americans (for example, complete legal protection for police officers, and absolutely no protection for anyone they say is not a citizen, which includes people who were not born here, but sometimes includes people who are trans, Black, Jewish or even Native American).

Neoliberalism: Where liberalism went wrong

If you take the long view of history, every major social change involves one class of people taking power from the previous ruling class. In the early “slave era” there were enslaved people and lords, with no justification for slavery but violence. Next, came the feudal period; slavery had not worked out because the enslaved people rebelled, so a new class of people added a religious justification to get working people to go along with their own exploitation. Liberalism was the idea that helped people move from feudalism to the next order: capitalism. It did so by adding another justification: That only a government can be tyrannical. Based on this logic, an individual who is not part of the government cannot by a tyrant even if they literally own everything.

Capitalists identified this workaround early on, and they were able to steer the liberal movement away from freedom for everyone and instead toward increasing their own power. In place of the ineffable plan of God, they used the Invisible Hand of the Market as their justification for abusing working people. They grabbed as much power as they could, but comforted working people by pointing to the Bill of Rights and various contractual agreements as indicators that working people have rights. Again, liberalism can coexist with authoritarianism of all kinds if it has a laundry list of rights to make things seem OK; democracy is not required. In fact, liberalism tends to laugh at the idea of democracy, saying true democracy is an unattainable utopian dream, so it is best not to even try to create it. We are supposed to be content with a list of protections instead of holding true power — even though the power to grant us those protections lies with the same people who would abuse us.

Liberals try to take credit for the great advances toward democracy that took place in the industrial age, but if you look a little closer, liberals are not usually the vanguard of those movements. Instead, “dangerous leftists” are the ones leading the charge toward democratizing power.

Neoliberalism elevates the ideology of market capitalism to the status of a religion that makes capitalists the avatars of God. With the market being the will of God, everything it does is justified, no matter how horrific or insane. If the government sells all the water in my area to capitalists, and the capitalists take all that water to make a product that I can’t afford, and I and everyone I know dies of dehydration, that isn’t a crime against humanity – rather, it is a sad but ultimately good outcome of following the will of God. This may seem absurd, but “water privatization” is a real problem all over the world, including in the US.

Neoliberalism tries to turn everything into a problem to be solved by the market – not just business, but government, education, and every other aspect of human behavior. Even our sexuality is frequently subjected to an economic analysis. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, yes, everything should be subjected to an economic analysis – economics is a science and science is good,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There’s a lot I could say about it, but in the interest of time, I’ll just say that ethical behavior is not usually the most economically advantageous behavior, and if your economics assume ethical behavior without teaching ethical behavior, what you will get is evil that’s been justified by math.

Neoliberalism believes that the market is the will of God, but to follow the will of God, the people participating in the market need data. Without data, the actions of the market are chaotic; with perfect data, the market perfectly reflects the will of God (or so neoliberals believe). Therefore, neoliberals are obsessed with counting beans. Some jobs have become so beholden to bean counters that most of the job is creating bean reports. Once the beans have been counted and analyzed, then workers receive important guidelines from the supervisors on how to be more “efficient” which doesn’t mean efficient, but rather means maximizing the number of dollars in the pocket of the capitalist. Again, if you’re thinking, “But maximizing dollars is the same as efficiency,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There are serious limits to the ability of money to accurately reflect value, because the only thing money can really reflect is the values of human beings with their limited knowledge and inherent fallibility; moreover, markets reflect the values of wealthy people far more than people who don’t have much money.

There is a relationship between identity politics and neoliberalism, it just isn’t quite what conservatives claim. As I’ve said, neoliberalism claims that we can achieve a perfectly rational market that adheres to the will of God, and as such is completely morally good. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and the myriad of other discriminatory behavior that is traditional in our society are all irrational and therefore are usually considered to be an affront to the market. Neoliberalism frowns upon them because they are irrational – not because they hurt people. It is just as likely to actively ignore human prejudices as it is to try to do something about them. One example would be the fact that women in the US are paid about 82 cents for every dollar men are paid. We can try to fix this somehow or we can justify it by saying that women choose to stay home with their children, thus (irrationally) opting out of the market.

As a neoliberal institution, the Democratic party’s solution to the wage gap has been to promote affordable childcare, which brings up another of neoliberalism’s characteristics: It tries to make all workers functionally the same; it claims that with training and gumption, any worker can perform any job. We are each a generic cog that can be adapted to any machine. This thinking reduces the role of a mother to the producer of new labor, denying the emotional relationship between them and their child. It also denies the emotional relationship between a father and their child, but that happened much earlier on, so we don’t even think much about it today. We can imagine other solutions, like the state paying parents to perform the important job of parenting, but those are not neoliberal solutions because they reduce the flow of cash into the capitalists’ pockets — and when profits are reduced, that’s called “inefficiency”.

Racists can (and do) use neoliberalism and its focus on economic logic to reinforce racist institutions. For example, they may say that the police aren’t harassing people in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood because police are only going there because that’s where the crime is – so in the economic analysis, crime is the demand which the system supplies with police violence. Therefore, the institution of policing is not racist. But the truth is that if the police spend all their time in a given neighborhood, they’ll inevitably find more crime there than they find in places where they aren’t looking. That’s not all – the police are only able to see particular kinds of crime that are both relatively trivial and more common among people who are poor. The truly horrific crimes require money and power to execute, and it is so difficult for police to do anything about those crimes, that they don’t even try.  

In conclusion:

Liberalism is the idea that normal people should have a list of rights and freedoms, but not direct control of power. Liberals demand rights; they do not demand power.
Neoliberalism is the ideology of the superiority of market capitalism, and, by extension, capitalists – an extension of liberalism that justifies capitalists as the ruling class.