What is anti-fascism?

The term 'antifascism' does not merely mean simply 'non-fascism'. Instead it has been applied to describe a more coherent and radical style of organisation. The most obvious way to see anti-fascism is as a responsive tradition, one whose logic has been determined by fascist activity. Yet in the actual course of responding to fascism, anti-fascists have drawn on previous historical parallels. If fascism is a movement of ideas and people, then anti-fascism has its own implied alternatives. The focus in this section is on the constructive agenda implied by anti-fascist activity since 1945. Anti-fascism is defined positively here as a relatively consistent reading of the past based on a familiarity with a certain core of key texts, literary and historical. Three such areas are examined: (1) the collective anti-fascist memory of the 1920s and 1930s, (2) the positive idea of anti-fascism found in various cultural forms, (3) the work of anti-fascist historians. The essay then examines (4) some challenges faced by this developed tradition.

(1) Since 1945, anti-fascists have found in the interwar period an important stock of shared experiences. Anti-fascists have argued that that from the moment of its birth in Italy, fascism always found its chief antagonists on the left. The fascists challenged existing socialist parties whose strength depended on popular support. Fascism attempted to win a similar audience, if to use it for different, more reactionary ends. The left and the right responded to each other as opponents. Later, when fascism took power, it was the left that provided Mussolini or Hitler with their first victims. The 'anti-fascist' response was not homogeneous. Liberals, Socialists, Communists and others could draw on different traditions in opposing fascism. Yet there were some lessons that tended to be accepted by anti-fascists across party divisions. 
One was that fascism was an irreconcilable enemy. The words of Frank Thompson were perhaps typical. Their author was a British intelligence officer who served alongside Bulgarian partisans in 1944. He was captured by the Bulgarian state, and executed. In a letter home to his family, he remembered the first anti-fascist martyrs, the people who had died in 1936 in Spain, 'Those of us who came after were merely adopting an idea, that they proved, that freedom and fascism can't live in the same world, and that the free man, one he realises this, will always win' (Thompson: 67).
Another common argument was that the whole left was threatened by the rise of the right. Anti-fascists should put aside all temporary divisions and work together to prevent the rise of this great enemy. Yet diverse traditions advocated different forms of unity. The main form of anti-fascist unity in 1920s Italy was the Arditi del popolo, an alliance of former soldiers with radical unionists. The movement was isolated, however, and defeated. The Socialists and Communists had no time to grasp the threat ahead of them, before Mussolini took power. Between 1930 and 1932, German Communists again argued for anti-fascist unity, but insisted that this should be done under the aegis of a minority, fighting organisation. The result was the Iron Front, an alliance of Communists with some members of the SPD's paramilitary Reichsbanner. The Communist Party was able to run what should have been a united project.
Many inter-war Marxists including Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone, Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky defended a different strategy, the 'united front'. In criticism of the German Communists, they insisted that genuine unity required more than just one party repackaging itself under another name. They argued instead for a combination of all socialists. The alliance should lead to the maximum anti-fascist activity. The best strategy to confront fascism, they argued, would be one of working-class alliance. If a confident, cohesive working class confronted fascism, then the leaders of the fascist party would prove unable to hold their supporters together in opposition to it. 
These and similar arguments did not go unnoticed. In Germany, the non-Communist left was aware of the threat. Copies of pamphlets calling for unity sold in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Breakaway parties were formed to the left of the Socialists or to the right of the Communists, calling for both to adopt united front politics. Independent journalists and artists took up the call. Yet the leaders of the socialists and Communists alike failed to grasp their chance. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler's Nazis took power. Within four months, the left-wing parties and the unions were banned.
After Italy and Germany, the third place where anti-fascist tactics were tried was in Spain. For the most part, the defence of the Spanish Republic was a heroic cause. Tens of thousands of Spaniards died in the defence of democracy. They were joined by large numbers of international volunteers. The best activists of the European and American left served in the International Brigades. They fought and died for an internationalist cause. Some of the most famous conflicts between fascists and anti-fascists (such as the Battle of Cable Street in London) took place outside Spain, but while the Civil War continued, and in the very shadow of that cause.
Yet the politics of the Civil War were complicated by changes in Communist tactics. After 1935, the spokesmen of the Communist International argued for a new form of anti-fascist alliance, the Popular Front. Unity was now to be conducted with any force, right up to the edges of the fascist party itself. Despite the important and brave resistance that the people of Spain employed against Franco, the history of the Spanish Republican was also the story of a radical movement that found itself undermined by internal disputes. Anarchists and others called for a revolutionary war against Franco. They suggested vital, creative tactics, such as the arming of popular volunteers (which was accepted) or the acceptance of the national right to independence as a means to undermine Franco's hold over his Moroccan troops (this was not tried). Meanwhile, Communists, Liberals and some right-wing Socialists devoted themselves to the opposite task, the running down of the Spanish revolution for the sake of a potential alliance with the moderate socialists of Britain and France.
The memory of interwar anti-fascism has served to provide important lessons to activists since. The imperative of unity has been generally accepted, although the best form of that unity remained a subject of discussion. Important figures in the history of anti-fascist resistance have been known and celebrated. The memory of the interwar period has also changed, as the Communist Parties of the immediate post-war period have given way to different generations of new lefts. Yet there was also a certain fund of common experiences, upon which later generations of anti-fascists have drawn.

(2) As well as shared historical experiences, certain books, songs, plays, paintings and other cultural forms have been shared by anti-fascists across Europe since. Many were first produced for audiences of workers or intellectuals in the interwar years. One such has been Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara, a plausible account of an anti-fascist uprising in an isolated village in southern Italy. Silone's own reputation has since come under fire from within his native Italy. His book has continued to be popular, however, as have the plays derived from it. Other forms of anti-fascist culture from the 1920s and 1930s include the pacifist essays of Albert Einstein; the anti-war paintings of Pablo Picasso, including his classic work 'Guernica', painted in response to Franco's bombing raids; the poems and montage art of the Volksbühne circle, including John Heartfield; the radical sexology of Wilhelm Reich; the pessimistic cultural essays of Walter Benjamin; and the books written by such Holocaust survivors as Primo Levi. The British novelist Virginia Woolf fired her own broadside against fascism. Her book Three Guineas argued that fascist violence depended on certain images of male virtue, which had also appeared even in liberal or mainstream texts.
The Nazis dubbed Weimar art and music 'degenerate'. Not surprisingly, anti-fascists have used it as a common resource to draw on since. The outstanding examples of such culture were the plays produced by Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator and Kurt Weill. The anti-fascist theatre of the 1920s and 1930s did not see its task as being to provide high-brow thrills to the middle classes, but rather to create a new art, owned by plebeian audiences. The playwrights introduced bawdy songs and situations modelled on boxing-fights or union meetings. In the proletarian citadel of Wedding, they drew on a network of workers' choirs and acting groups. They forced their audience to think, to test their own ideas, to challenge all authority.
In a number of poems, Bertolt Brecht also attempted to put a demotic, even humorous case against fascism. His 'Song of the S.A. Man' asked why individual workers had signed up for Hitler's party, couldn't they see that they and their brothers would lose out too? Another poem, 'But for the Jews Advising Against It', made the ironic point that if the Jews were so extraordinary and so powerful, then why had Hitler not used them (rather than the German) in order to take on the world? Long before Hitler threatened for power, Brecht railed against the society in which fascism could flourish. 
Certain other cultural forms, evolved in one country to meet a specific need, have tended to become general and now form part of the common iconography of anti-fascist campaigns across Europe and North America. They include the three anti-fascist arrows of inter-war German anti-fascism; the yellow 'lollipop' symbol, employed by the Anti-Nazi League in 1970s Britain; punk dress and music, derived from the same campaign; and the outstretched yellow hand of the French movement SOS-Racisme, often with the slogan attached to it, 'don't touch my friend'. 

(3) Several historians have also contributed to the emergence of anti-fascism. They include writers who have commemorated previous moments of anti-fascist protest in Italy, France and elsewhere. There is a long German tradition of books dedicated to the various anti-Nazi resisters in that country, including at one pole of experience, the worker-Communists who were portrayed as the founders of the East German state, and at the other, the aristocrats who took part in such anti-Nazi plots as the 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. Other traditions have also been commemorated, including the post-war movement that emerged to de-Nazify Germany, which was then crushed by the various occupying powers. Important English-language texts include Tom Behan on the anti-fascist Arditi and Allan Merson on the German Communist resistance. Even in countries where fascism was more marginal, a similar historical literature has developed, remembering the part played by anti-fascist campaigns.
A number of post-war radical historians have also turned their attention on fascism, seeking to explain how this movement was able to grow in popularity, which forces remained resistant to it, and how the total dynamics of fascist society worked. Major figures in this literature have included Tim Mason, the historian of industrial resistance by German workers, and Donny Gluckstein, whose work chronicles the links between capitalism and the Nazi Party. Other historians have explored the anti-fascist theories of the interwar years, including the theory of 'Caesarism' developed by Gramsci, and the arguments for the United Front, which have been most often associated with Leon Trotsky. These and similar works have contributed to a common historical consciousness, shared by many active anti-fascists from different political traditions.

(4) How well has this tradition been equipped to face the different challenges experienced by anti-fascists in recent years? The greatest problem faced by anti-fascists is that inter-war fascism and post-war fascism have not been entirely alike. We can list just a few differences here. First of all, post-war fascism has frequently attempted to conceal its own past. Neo-fascists in France deny that they have a link to the inter-war years. Their Italian equivalents describe themselves as 'post-fascists'. Second, the far right has been less obsessed with the task of building a mass activist party, in competition with the far left. One reason for this has been the relative decline of the old Communist Parties, and their replacement by a more diffuse series of anti-capitalist 'lefts'. Another has been the relative success the far right has achieved through electoral rather than street politics. Third, the main popular slogans of post-war fascism have been immediately racial rather than economic in character. Fourth, the far right has grown in areas where it was previously much weaker, including in third world countries. Fifth, the post-war years have seen fascistic parties sharing in government power, but without the economic crisis of the interwar years, or (yet) the same calamitous results.
Each of these processes have created challenges for anti-fascists. Anti-fascist tactics have evolved in different ways in each country and at different times. Some writers, including Alain Bihr in France, have set out to prove that parties such as the Front National remain linked to fascist traditions. They share an organisational structure a legacy of common politics, and a similar ambivalence towards democracy. Other campaigners have continued to attach the epithets 'fascist' or 'Nazi' to their antagonists. The greater the public acceptance of this approach, the harder that the various far right parties have indeed found it to present themselves as changed forces.
The conversion of neo-fascist parties to an electoralist strategy has raised tactical problems. In contrast to the 1920s and 1930s, the immediate postwar years were ones of rapid economic growth and relative prosperity. Meanwhile, the fascist parties hampered by their association with Nazi genocide and an unpopular war. Such organisations as the Italian MSI argued that only the adoption of more moderate-seeming tactics could increase their support. Anti-fascists have found that certain pre-war tactics, such as the mass march designed to prevent a fascist mobilisation have had less success than previously, largely because the fascists themselves have not been marching. While the tactics of mass mobilisation have remained important to anti-fascists, many have also had to develop new forms of electoral work. 
The slogans of the post-war fascists in these elections have been shaped by anti-immigrant racism. Race is perhaps even more ubiquitous in their propaganda than it was for the equivalent parties before 1933. Yet the process has been contradictory. For Europe has witnessed growing racial integration, even as the popular press has expressed its hatred of successive waves of labour migrants and refugees. Whatever the complexities, the task facing electoral anti-fascists has been to win an argument in defence of peaceful racial cohabitation. In comparison to inter-war anti-fascism, its post-war forms have been much more 'cultural' and less 'economic'.
The success of parties influenced by fascist traditions in countries outside Europe has challenged the tendency of anti-fascists to define their tradition in European terms. The 1990s witnessed successive protests in India against communalism, which seemed to replicate patterns of organisation witnessed elsewhere, in Germany, Italy or France. Does the success of such forces as the RSS in India prove that we are once again living in an 'age of fascism'? Or conversely, does the emergence of a North American neo-Nazi tradition, based on 'Aryan' racist cells, survivalism and domestic terrorism, demonstrate the real diversity of contemporary far-right politics, and its escape beyond the relative narrowness of the inter-war models? Either argument would have profound implications for anti-fascist tactics in the contemporary world. 
Finally, anti-fascists have had to respond to the participation of post-war fascist parties in local and national government. Each far-right advance has been met by waves of popular protest. The greater the initial success, the greater has been the public resistance. Yet the experience of fascist advance has also created an expectation of further success. Widespread protests met the election of Berlusconi's first Italian government, which included two far-right parties, the National Alliance and the Northern Leagues. The early response to the election of Berlusconi's second government was far more muted. Anti-fascists have also been charged with explaining the difference between the experience of inter-war and post-war fascism in government. Both Mussolini and Hitler entered government as leaders of minority parties in cabinet. Yet buoyed up by the support of extra-parliamentary armies, they were able to achieve a re-ordering of the state. Post-war fascist parties governing as minority members of coalitions in Europe (Italy, Austria) or outside (India) have not attempted any similar 'fascisation' of the nation. Some anti-fascists have concluded that the post-war fascism has indeed been more moderate than its predecessors. Another response has been to point out that the particular radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s depended not just on the ideology of the new fascist parties but on the total economic and social context in which they took power. Were Europe or the world to enter such a period of catastrophic economic decline as was witnessed after 1929, then the contemporary far right would then be far better placed than it was even in the inter-war years to turn its dystopia into reality. The message of postwar anti-fascism has remained: vigilance.

Behan, T. (2002), The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini. London: Bookmarks.
Bihr, Alain (1986), La Farce Tranquille Normalisation à la Française. Paris: Spartacus.
Bihr, Alain (1992), Pour en finir avec le Front National. Paris: Syros.
Copsey, N (2000), Anti-Fascism in Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Gluckstein, D. (1999), The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class. London: Bookmarks.
Mason, T. (1993), Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the National Community. Oxford: Berg.
Merson, A. (1985), Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Renton, D. (1999), Fascism, Theory and Practice. London: Pluto
Renton, D. (2000), Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s. London: Macmillan Press.
Thompson, E. P. (1997), Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944. London: Merlin Press.