Antifa and Terrorism: A Provisional Antifascist Reading List
On Monday, September 22, Donald Trump signed an executive order designated antifa (antifascists/antifascism) as a domestic terrorist organization. It claims that "Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government" and that it "employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives [and] conceal its funding sources and operations." In reality, however, antifascist organizing is extremely decentralized and has no hierarchical structure or rigid discipline which would draw a clear distinction between organized antifascists and antifascist members of the general population. Neither does the president have the power to designate terrorist organizations (let alone domestic terrorist organizations, which isn't even a legal category in the United States).
Hierarchical structure and rigid discipline are attributes of fascism, though. And also governments, militaries, law enforcement, etc. Fascists imagine their enemies as a mirror image, the image of the state, and are shocked and frustrated over and over again as those enemies turn out to be something else entirely. It's like they're grasping at smoke. Which isn't to say that fascists don't do an enormous amount of harm, of course. But they can never truly understand what opposes them.
I'm going to list some books and essays that I've read, with some info about the insights from each of them, with the hopes of maybe encouraging others to learn some about fascism and the history of resistance to fascism. It's very incomplete, there's a lot more I want to read than what I've read. But it's a start. Fascists can't understand antifascism or even non-fascism, but antifascists can understand fascism, often better than fascists themselves do.
Ur-Fascism - Umberto Eco
This one goes around a lot, because it's short and to the point. Umberto Eco grapples with the difficulty of defining fascism by listing 14 features, which are not universal among all instances of fascism but are all capable of being part of the core of any fascist movement. It clarifies a lot, and it's easy to understand how each of the 14 points works towards authoritarian ends.
The Anatomy of Fascism - Robert O. Paxton
This one is primarily a historical account of the various forms fascism has taken for the purpose of, eventually, arriving at a definition. Paxton's definition is probably one of the best short definitions of fascism you will find anywhere:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Reading through the whole book and arriving at that definition at the end is quite an experience, especially because it comes with the understanding that even that definition is necessarily incomplete. Just as Ur-Fascism describes different fascisms as being connected by "family resemblance" rather than a single coherent phenomenon, The Anatomy of Fascism frames fascism as a term for a variety of related and overlapping historical evens which are just as difficult to group together under a single heading as they are to totally separate from each other.
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook - Mark Bray
Despite the name, this one is more of an oral history of antifascist organizing than anything like a manual for resisting fascism. It covers a lot, but a lot of the writing is directed at a particular time and place: North America during the mid 2010s. It's still good, and an easier read than some of the other books I'm going to recommend.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Wilhelm Reich
An interesting thing about this one is that copies of it were thrown at police during student protests in May 1968. There's a lot about Reich's thinking that is strange, in more ways than one, but this book is an attempt at understanding fascism from a psychological perspective, and there's a lot of good insights in it. He argued that fascism was ultimately the result of sexual repression in the masses, for which fascist authoritarianism appears to offer simultaneously a kind of relief and a kind of reinforcement. In other words, fascism offers freedom from the agony of unrealized desire by way of patriarchal domination of women, religious reawakening enabling new forms and degrees of repression, and vicarious release through the spectacular and bombastic indulgences of the fascist leader(s).
The Psychological Structure of Fascism - Georges Bataille
Like the previous example, this is an early attempt at explaining fascism psychologically. Unlike Mass Psychology, this one doesn't work from a framework of sexual repression, but instead develops a framework distinguishing between the homogeneous elements of society (productive, liberal, middle class, businessmen as opposed to workers) and the heterogeneous elements (everything unassimilable into homogeneity). Interestingly, both fascist leaders and the victims of fascism are heterogeneous (the former above, the latter below the rest of society), and under fascism the homogeneous parts of society are taken by a fascination and uneasy identification with the fascist hierarchy. Short, but a challenging read.
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism - Fredy Perlman
The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the holocausts, can only lead people to want to dismantle the system, is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is truer, namely that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetrate holocausts.
What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?
Fascism is, above all else, an extreme form of nationalism. "Palingenetic ultranationalism" is a definition of fascism sometimes thrown around, originating from Roger Griffin. I think it's overly simplistic, but I also think an analysis and critique of nationalism is necessary to understand fascism. Ultimately, the terror and political violence of fascism inheres in the form of the nation-state. Fascist violence is already present under "normal" conditions for marginal/peripheral populations, it's just largely invisible and/or perceived as ordinary to the majority until manifest fascism appears.
I've quoted Fredy Perlman on this blog before. His writing can be powerful, and it often covers enormous regions of time and space. I don't think he was right about everything, but he was able to extract insights from a much more complete picture of the world than most people are working with at any given time.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
Almost a guilty pleasure for me. I've read this book several times, and I've slowly been reading through as much of D&G's other works as I can. They build on some of the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, interrogating psychoanalysis and desire under capitalism, and exploring the question of where exactly fascist desire comes from, how it develops. They initially draw a distinction between social production (industry and economics) and desiring-production (psychology and sexuality), only to frame them as two "regimes" of the same process. Capitalism gives rise to fascism because capitalist social production and fascist desiring-production arise from the same underlying social formation, which takes concrete form in and as the nuclear family.
Male Fantasies - Klaus Theweleit
A monumental two-volume work drawing on both Wilhelm Reich's work and that of Deleuze & Guattari, analyzing various texts relating to proto-fascism all the way to full nazism: diaries, popular novels, various propaganda, personal accounts, journalism, history. One of the most important things I've ever read, also one of the most frightening and difficult. Hard to summarize something both so broad and specific, but it essentially frames the fascist as someone with an underdeveloped ego, an ego which takes the form of muscle armor. The purpose of this armor is to contain the life force within, except for when it is directed as a weapon at representatives of the life force without. Everything must be made still, solid, safe, and empty. Every good and acceptable thing in its place, and everything else pulverized.
Obviously, this is a very narrow and very specific selection of things you could read about fascism. There's a lot more. In particular, feminism is good to read for understanding fascism. Klaus Theweleit points out that much of what he was analyzing was already known to women as the experience of oppression under patriarchy. Reading about the history of white supremacy and racism is also helpful, since fascism is almost always intensely racist.
This list was thrown together quickly and I don't know how worthwhile it even is, but it's the least I can do. Regardless, ICE is fascist and is a domestic terrorist organization, and must be destroyed. It has been this way since it was created, and the politicians from both parties that have supported it are also fascist. That's the situation we're in.