Mark Bray (2)

A history of the militant struggle against fascism during peacetime from around 1900 to the present. It's important to be aware of the contribution of the militant struggle to keeping fascism down. But, as the book itself says, we also need to build a broad popular movement to prevent fascism gaining a foothold on the political landscape.

The major problem with this book is that it doesn’t mention any mainstream anti-fascist activism (examples in the UK include Unite Against Fascism, Hope show more Not Hate, and Movement for Justice). The policy of no platform for racists has been very widely used to prevent racists and fascists from speaking at universities and other venues.

If you didn’t know anything about anti fascist organizations, you could come away from this book with the impression that the only thing that held fascism at bay was the armed struggle against it — which is clearly important, but not the whole story.

Given the fact that we are currently dealing with an upsurge of fascist violence, and the penetration of fascistic behaviour and policy into the governments of various countries (the UK and the USA among them), a re-evaluation of the contribution of armed antifa groups was clearly overdue.

However, I would have liked to see more about groups like Unite Against Fascism, Hope Not Hate, and Movement for Justice.

I did find the book somewhat unputdownable and would definitely recommend reading it. It's very well written and explains a lot that was previously unclear to me. It's very clear that we all owe a debt of gratitude to the generations of unsung Antifa whose eternal vigilance has kept the fascists from organizing.

The section on free speech is important, as it provides good arguments as to why fascist ideas should have no place in public discourse, and there's no point debating them because they are not rational.

We as a culture have to push back against all manifestations of racism: micro-aggressions, slurs, hate speech, statues glorifying colonialism, under-representation of BAME/BIPOC people in the media, racist policing, courts, prisons, all the way to fascist and white supremacist groups. It will take a broad and deep approach to root out fascism and racism and white supremacism.

The book concludes with the view that both mass organization against fascism and militant anti-fascism are necessary to prevent outbreaks of fascism (such as the ones we are currently witnessing). show less

Informative about the roots and current struggles of Antifa groups. However, the first chapter reads like a Trotsky tract with an eye-crossing rapid fire of political faction names both foreign and domestic making the read a little bit of a slog but it is necessary for political grounding when moving on to the more interesting second chapter and beyond. The same problem is apparent in later chapters but not to the degree as the first and the reading off of org names is necessary. The show more paragraph-long anecdote at the beginning of chapter 6 was enlightening and I found this quote a good measure of Antifa itself:
You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don't have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don't have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don't have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don't have to fight them with tanks.
-Murray from Baltimore
There were many pertinent historical and unfortunately current examples as to why Antifa is a necessary force on the stage of modern politics. Overall I would recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in Antifa especially those fed up with the far right and Trump emboldened racist groups. show less

I wanted to read Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by historian Mark Bray because I am conflicted by Antifa. On the one hand, every human being who aspires to morality and decency must be anti-fascist. On the other hand, violence other than in self-defense is an immoral tactic. It is also strategically wrong. However, I wanted to understand how they perceived this moral dilemma.

The first chapters are a history of the anti-fascist movement. This resembles nothing so much as a military show more campaign history, recounting the endless encounters and troop movements of nearly a century of anti-fascist struggle. It is the dreariest collection of acronyms and mentioning that I have read. Bray seems driven by a desire not to forget any chapter of Antifa, no matter how small, for fear of offending. To be fair, I think there is nothing duller than military histories that follow every company from battle to battle to battle. It’s not more interesting when it’s about political activism, even though it is important to me.

It would be far better to have an appendix listing the Antifa organizations or perhaps a graphic timeline. This is boring. It also makes it hard to see broad historical movement because we are awash in the minutia. Nonetheless, Bray makes the argument that Antifa was successful in making fascism “not worth it” and kept them at bay through the end of the 20th century.

In the third chapter, Bray covers more recent fascist and anti-fascist conflict – conflict the fascists are winning by changing their tactics and anti-fascists seem to be losing by not changing their tactics. We certainly see the results with Golden Dawn in Green, National Front in France, and the alt-right in the United States. Encouraged by the defective election of Donald Trump, Nazis are marching in the open and Antifa is standing up to them. From this history, Bray condenses five historical lessons to inform anti-fascist organizing.

The rest of the book is far more interesting. Bray wrestles with the many critiques of Antifa from free speech legalists and nonviolent direct action proponents. Some of his arguments are very persuasive and center on what Karl Popper called the Paradox of Tolerance. It’s kind of weird that Bray does not mention Popper at all since his argument echoes Popper’s argument that tolerating the intolerant leads to an intolerant society. It’s not that he does not reach to philosophy, he tackles John Milton’s Areopagitica asserting that Milton is wrong on the fact, Truth does not always win. If the first half of the book was half as interesting as the second, I would be far more enthusiastic about it.

I agree that there should be no platform for fascists. I don’t want the government to suppress their speech, but I do want anyone who gives them air to feel the swift reprisal of public opinion, of boycotts, public shaming, and economic punishment. If a university is committed to honest scholarship, they will never give air to fascists. There is no academic integrity in promoting lies. Academic freedom is expansive, but it must not expand to promoting racist, genocidal ideologies.

Bray is correct that fascism does not require a military coup to take power. Historically, it gained power much the way the alt-right is gaining power and the way Trump succeeded in being installed by the Electoral College and Putin. They get money and support from corporatists while recruiting working-class whites with racist blandishments.

As to violence, while I can understand the rationale, when he gives examples of nonviolent protesters who were protected by Antifa from fascist violence, I recall that the success of the civil rights movement was won by the moral contrast between the nonviolent resistance and the abuses and violence of the state. When that contrast is lost, can we win?

These are tough questions and I don’t know the answers. I think this book is a useful guide to some of the questions and to understanding how people in Antifa understand the dilemma – though there is no unanimity and Antifa members are divided on tactics, but they are united always, as we all should be, in opposing fascism.

As to all of us being Antifa, Bray makes that much more complicated. For him, Antifa is not just anti-fascist. It is also anarchic and anti-capitalist. For him, there’s no such thing as a liberal anti-fascist. As economic injustice creates space for fascist recruitment, he argues that anti-fascism must be anti-capitalist. This seems to come from the same false presumption that economic justice will solve racial justice, a fatal misunderstanding of how racism is how economic injustice is perpetuated.

I received an e-galley of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook from the publisher through Edelweiss.

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook at Melville House
Mark Bray author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/9781612197036/ show less

Having grown in the sixties, public protest has been normalized for me. I have personal experience as well with the alt-right and Antifa as they were protesting on the college campus where I work. I am glad they were there to protest, but as with any protest that turns to violence -- you have to ask yourself is there an alternative. My belief is that if you don't stand up for yourself, no one else will. It's easy to sit in your living room and make judgements about how other people should show more act. With that said, this is a thorough history of the anti-fascist movement in both Europe and the United States. Thank you, Mark Bray, for writing it. I received this book as an ARC through Edelweiss Plus and the publishers. show less