Antifa

Mark Bray, a historian of modern Europe and former Occupy Wall Street organizer, presents the first English-language transnational history of postwar anti-fascism. Written during the early months of the Trump administration and based on 61 interviews with current and former anti-fascists from 17 countries, the book argues that militant anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to a fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and has grown especially urgent in recent years. Bray defines anti-fascism not as the simple negation of fascism but as a method of politics rooted in socialist, anarchist, and communist traditions, one that rejects faith in rational debate or parliamentary institutions as sufficient safeguards and instead advocates direct action to shut down fascist organizing.

Bray opens by cataloging white-supremacist violence in the wake of Donald Trump's election, including the arson of a Texas mosque, attacks on LGBTQ centers, and the murder of a Black man by a white-supremacist veteran. He connects these incidents to a longer history of fascist terror, citing the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire's argument that Nazism was essentially European colonialism brought home. After defining fascism through historian Robert Paxton's framework, which emphasizes obsessive preoccupation with national decline, compensatory cults of unity, and the pursuit of redemptive violence, Bray distinguishes between legalistic anti-fascism, which pursues antiracist legislation, and confrontational direct-action anti-fascism, the focus of this book.

The historical survey begins with proto-fascist and proto-anti-fascist movements. Bray traces resistance to the 1890s Dreyfus affair in France, when anarchists and revolutionary socialists physically contested anti-Semitic leagues through counterdemonstrations and infiltration. He also cites Paxton's argument that fascism, understood functionally, originated in the 1860s American South with the Ku Klux Klan, and describes early resistance including armed self-defense by Black Union League members and Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching campaign.

Turning to interwar Europe, Bray describes how Benito Mussolini's Black Shirts terrorized Italian socialists with backing from economic elites while the Left fractured over doctrinal disputes. The Arditi del Popolo, the first militant anti-fascist organization, was founded in 1921 by the anarchist Argo Secondari and mobilized 20,000 members, but it was fatally undermined when the Socialist Party signed a pact with Mussolini and the Communist Party withdrew its members. Mussolini rose to power not through insurrection but through manipulation of a fragmented liberal government; the king appointed him in October 1922. In Weimar Germany, socialists and communists fought each other more than they fought Adolf Hitler's growing National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). The Communist International's "third period" analysis, announced in 1928, branded social democrats as "social fascists," deepening the Left's divisions at the moment Nazi violence was escalating sharply. Hitler was appointed chancellor legally in January 1933, and neither faction could forestall the catastrophe.

Bray devotes significant attention to the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when an estimated 100,000 demonstrators in London erected barricades and prevented Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists from marching through the largely Jewish East End, an event that became the most enduring model of united anti-fascist resistance. He also covers the Spanish Civil War as both a high point and a fracture point: The International Brigades, composed of 32,000 to 35,000 volunteers from 53 countries, fought alongside the Republic, but conflicts between communists who opposed social revolution and anarchists who considered war and revolution inseparable tore the coalition apart.

The book's second major section traces modern antifa from 1945 through 2003. Bray opens with the formation of the 43 Group in 1946, a militant organization of mainly Jewish British veterans that attacked fascist events, infiltrated Mosley's organization, and effectively dismantled Mosleyite fascism by 1950. As postwar immigration from former colonies transformed European demographics, racist backlash fueled far-right resurgence, provoking responses including the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism in 1970s Britain. Bray traces how antifa spread across Europe through distinct national currents: In France, multiracial groups of radical punks like the Red Warriors patrolled neighborhoods confronting white-power skinheads; in West Germany, autonomous militants called the Autonomen developed the black bloc tactic of uniformly black-clad, masked protesters engaging in coordinated street confrontation. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, neo-Nazi violence exploded across Germany, and the autonomous anti-fascist movement expanded rapidly in response. In North America, Anti-Racist Action (ARA) was founded in Minneapolis in 1987 by the Baldies, a multiracial antiracist skinhead crew, and grew into a predominantly anarchist network spanning over 200 locations.

Bray then examines the contemporary landscape, where far-right parties across Europe have cultivated mainstream appeal by shifting from biological racism to rhetoric emphasizing cultural difference and security. The French Front National under Marine Le Pen, the Dutch Party for Freedom under Geert Wilders, and Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) pose challenges that strategies designed for small neo-Nazi street movements cannot easily address. In Greece, the explicitly fascist Golden Dawn party surged during the economic crisis, prompting anti-fascist motorcycle patrols through immigrant neighborhoods. The September 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by Golden Dawn members sparked nationwide outrage and the arrest of nearly 70 party leaders. In the United States, the February 2017 anti-Milo Yiannopoulos protest at the University of California, Berkeley, catapulted "antifa" into the national spotlight when black-clad protesters shut down an event at which Yiannopoulos reportedly planned to publicly name undocumented students.

From this history, Bray draws five lessons: Fascists have always gained power legally rather than through revolution; interwar leaders underestimated fascism by treating it as conventional counterrevolution; party leadership was consistently slower to recognize the threat than rank-and-file members; fascism continually appropriates left-wing ideology and culture; and small fascist groups can grow into mass movements, meaning every group should be treated seriously from its inception.

Bray devotes a full chapter to the free speech debate, arguing that the "marketplace of ideas" is distorted by wealth and power and that fascist ideas have sometimes thrived in open debate. He states his own position: "No platforming" does infringe on fascist speech, but the infringement is justified. He counters the "slippery slope" argument by noting that anti-fascist groups consistently disband when local fascist activity declines. A final chapter examines the relationship between militant and nonviolent tactics, emphasizing that most anti-fascist activity involves no physical violence. Bray surveys creative tactics including years-long singing vigils outside a Nazi house in Denmark and online infiltration campaigns. He introduces the concept of "everyday anti-fascism," the daily work of ordinary people to increase the social cost of bigotry, citing the May 2017 Portland train attack, in which Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche were killed defending two young women from a white supremacist, as an embodiment of this ideal.

In his conclusion, Bray argues that the only long-term solution to fascism is to undermine its pillars of support, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and class rule. Militant anti-fascism, he concludes, is necessary but not sufficient: Anti-fascists must also build compelling alternative visions capable of outcompeting far-right platforms. A 2022 introduction by Joshua Clover frames the book's continued relevance by tracing a "red thread" from Berkeley through the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, arguing that anti-fascism designates an abolitionist practice aimed at dismantling hierarchies of race, class, and gender.