Antifascism Against Machismo

An intergenerational dialogue on the meaning of feminist antifascism. Anti-Fascism Against Machismo collects & continues a conversation begun by Tammy Kovich (as "Petronella Lee") in 2019. Four feminist, antifascist revolutionaries jump off from each other's reflections & bring the particularities of their varied contexts to bear on one central problem: What has & will a women's war against fascism look like? Kovich kicks things off with a probing look at the central importance of gender to fascism, & its particular formulations in today's far right. She continues by examining the historic role of women as partisans in three antifascist wars of the 1930s & 40s-Ethiopia, Spain, & Yugoslavia-contrasting this with the restrictive image of "antifa" as a young, Euro man of a particular subcultural aesthetic & antifascist activity as not much broader than street fights. Finally, she builds on this to propose what an antifascism that takes a fight against patriarchal domination-on the right & the left-seriously. Butch Lee, a white woman who worked in support of Black revolutionary movements & who sought to elaborate a vision of what a women's revolutionary movement must be, responded to Kovich's zine a few months later. The 80-year-old Amazon theorist brings her life of experience & study to bolster Kovich's main points, while asking questions about some limits she sees in the work. From 1950s white, small town New Jersey to the civil rights struggle in Southside Chicago, refugees from Tsarist pogroms to the fighters of the Black Liberation Army, Lee's most autobiographical public writing-the last before her death in 2021-questions Kovich's framing of antifascism as a limited struggle that must expand to meet the needs of a properly revolutionary politics. While Kovich's work focuses on the position of revolutionary women, stuck between misogynist fascists & macho antifascism, Butch Lee reframes the discussion around the position of white women: the reproducers of the "white race," colonized for the role, yet so often participants, willing collaborators in the extension & preservation of white supremacy. Lee asks what it means to see today's fascists as transcending their previous role as fringe cosplayers, now becoming something more intractable & more deeply rooted in the changes occurring in global patriarchal capitalism. Veronica L. then offered her own contribution, advancing the conversation by seeing the ways in which the analyses of fascism offered by Lee & Kovich each illuminated different aspects of what they all see as profoundly inter-related phenomena. She also applies the earlier works to her own experiences as a white woman organizing without cis men & to the new context made by the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic & the mass antiracist & anticolonial reverberations of #ShutDownCanada & the George Floyd rebellion, which had each reshaped the political context since Kovich & Lee's 2019 writings. The book also features a new introduction by El Jones, which continues & frames the discussion through her own experiences as a Black antifascist, antiracist, abolitionist organizer & educator on occupied Mi'kmaq land on Canada's east coast. In these times of rising instability, fracturing identities, & a resultant rise in challenges to & defences of white supremacist patriarchy, Antifascism Against Machismo makes a powerful contribution to the understanding needed for a revolutionary resistance at the same time as it offers a model for political discussion. Women building revolutionary theory together, between different contexts, across borders & generations, & beyond the stale fences of political sects.

What’s the relationship between combating the far right and working for systemic change? What does it mean when fascists intensify racial oppression and patriarchy but also call for the downfall of economic elites or even take up arms against the state? Three way fight politics confront these urgent questions squarely, arguing that the far right grows out of an oppressive capitalist order but is also in conflict with it in real ways, and that radicals need to combat both. The three way fight approach says we need sharper analysis of far-right movements so we can fight them more effectively, and we also need to track ongoing developments within the ruling class, including liberal or centrist efforts to co-opt antifascism as a tool of state repression and system legitimation. This book offers an introduction to three way fight politics, with more than thirty essays, position statements, and interviews from the Three Way Fight website and elsewhere, spanning from the antifascist struggles of the 1980s and 1990s to the political upheavals of the twenty-first century. Over fifteen authors explore a range of topics, such as fascist politics’ relationship with patriarchy and settler colonialism, Tom Metzger’s “Third Position” (anticapitalist) fascism, conflict within the business community over the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump administration’s shifting relationship with the organized far right. Many of the writings address issues of political strategy, such as tensions between radicals and liberals within the reproductive rights movement and the George Floyd rebellion, video gaming as an arena of political struggle, and the importance (and challenges) of approaching antifascist organizing in ways that are militant, community based, and nonsectarian.

The National Bestseller “Focused and persuasive... Bray’s book is many things: the first English-language transnational history of antifa, a how-to for would-be activists, and a record of advice from anti-Fascist organizers past and present.”—THE NEW YORKER "Insurgent activist movements need spokesmen, intellectuals and apologists, and for the moment Mark Bray is filling in as all three... The book’s most enlightening contribution is on the history of anti-fascist efforts over the past century, but its most relevant for today is its justification for stifling speech and clobbering white supremacists."—Carlos Lozada, THE WASHINGTON POST “[Bray’s] analysis is methodical, and clearly informed by both his historical training and 15 years of organizing, which included Occupy Wall Street…Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook couldn’t have emerged at a more opportune time. Bray’s arguments are incisive and cohesive, and his consistent refusal to back down from principle makes the book a crucial intervention in our political moment.”—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In the wake of tragic events in Charlottesville, VA, and Donald Trump's initial refusal to denounce the white nationalists behind it all, the "antifa" opposition movement is suddenly appearing everywhere. But what is it, precisely? And where did it come from? As long as there has been fascism, there has been anti-fascism — also known as “antifa.” Born out of resistance to Mussolini and Hitler in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s, the antifa movement has suddenly burst into the headlines amidst opposition to the Trump administration and the alt-right. They could be seen in news reports, often clad all in black with balaclavas covering their faces, demonstrating at the presidential inauguration, and on California college campuses protesting far-right speakers, and most recently, on the streets of Charlottesville, VA, protecting, among others, a group of ministers including Cornel West from neo-Nazi violence. (West would later tell reporters, "The anti-fascists saved our lives.") Simply, antifa aims to deny fascists the opportunity to promote their oppressive politics, and to protect tolerant communities from acts of violence promulgated by fascists. Critics say shutting down political adversaries is anti-democratic; antifa adherents argue that the horrors of fascism must never be allowed the slightest chance to triumph again. In a smart and gripping investigation, historian and former Occupy Wall Street organizer Mark Bray provides a detailed survey of the full history of anti-fascism from its origins to the present day — the first transnational history of postwar anti-fascism in English. Based on interviews with anti-fascists from around the world, Antifa details the tactics of the movement and the philosophy behind it, offering insight into the growing but little-understood resistance fighting back against fascism in all its guises.

While the historical significance of fascism and anti-fascism is still being hotly debated in Europe and around the world, this anthology offers a new look at the many faces of repression and resistance. Stanislao G. Pugliese brings together a wide range of voices that illuminate more than eighty years of fascism and anti-fascism in Italy. Many of the pieces, including letters from women to Mussolini and anti-fascist graffiti from a Nazi prison in Rome, are available in English for the first time. The selections include historical documents, political analysis, stories, songs, and memoirs from a variety of perspectives. Taken together, the documents provide a compelling account of the political, historical, economic, and social impact of fascism and the resistance. Touching on fields as far ranging as political science, history, women's studies, and religion, Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy is immediate, human, and eminently readable.

This volume offers new insight into the contextual background and literary-historical impact of Norman Mailer's body of work.

A fascinating and highly readable account of what it was like to be young and hip, growing up in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Living on the frontline of the Cold War, young people were subject to a number of competing influences. For young men from the working class, in particular, a conflict developed between the culture they inherited from their parents and the new official culture taught in schools. Merging with street gangs, new youth cultures took shape, which challenged authority and provided an alternative vision of modernity. Taking their fashion cues, music and icons from the West, they rapidly came into conflict with a didactic and highly controlling party-state. Charting the clashes which occurred between teenage rebels and the authorities, the book explores what happened when gender, sexuality, Nazism, communism and rock 'n' roll collided during a period, which also saw the building of the Berlin Wall.

These essays grapple with the class appeal of fascism, its continuities and breaks with the “regular” far-right and also even with the Left. Written from the perspective of revolutionaries active in the struggle against the far right.

In Jailbreak Out of History, revolutionary Amazon theorist Butch Lee shows how the anticolonial struggles of New Afrikan/Black women were central to the unfolding of 19th century amerika, both during and "after" slavery. The book's title essay, "The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman," recounts the life and politics of Harriet Tubman, who waged and eventually led the war against the capitalist slave system. As Lee explains, "Harriet Tubman was a radical political figure, someone totally involved as a player in the great political ideas and military storms of her day. She was a guerrilla. Someone who lived and taught others to live by the communal and working-class New Afrikan culture that her people had planted in this difficult ground, and a Black Feminist to the end." At the same time, Lee exposes how the white supremacist patriarchy has distorted the truth of Harriet's life, by both trivializing and exceptionalizing her. Countering this disinformation, "The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman" surveys the reality of struggle before and during the u.s. Civil War, showing how New Afrikan women were repeatedly taking up the task of smashing the slave system that confined them, on their own terms. Lee shows how what was special about Harriet was not that she was unique in resisting, but rather because of her military skill--"She was one of the most brilliant professional practitioners ever at the art of war. As a guerrilla, so elusive that she could strike fatal blows and never be felt. Lead battles and go unseen. As an Amazon, she conducted warfare in a zone beyond men's comprehension. But her blows still fell on point." Jailbreak Out of History's second essay, written in 2014, picks up the story where The Re-Biography leaves off, showing how New Afrikan women's labor and resistance remained central to how the global class struggle played out in the united states after the white men's Civil War came to an end. "The Evil of Female Loaferism" details New Afrikan women's attempts to withdraw from and evade capitalist colonialism, an unofficial but massive labor strike that threw the capitalists North and South into a panic. The ruling class response consisted of the "Black Codes," Jim Crow, re-enslavement through prison labor, mass violence, and ... the establishment of a neo-colonial Black patriarchy, whose task was to make New Afrikan women subordinate to New Afrikan men just as New Afrika was supposed to be subordinate to white amerika. "During the Civil War and after 1865, New Afrikan women led a limited strategy of rebellion both spontaneous and conscious. Away from patriarchal capitalism and its attempts to re-enslave them. Living their communal culture created for survival during captivity. Mass withholding of their labor from plantations, insistence on their right to reject fulltime wage labor, fighting to regain control over their bodies in production and reproduction both, New Afrikan women in particular cracked the old plantation system. For without the mass labor gangs the old plantation system couldn't work. The compromise they forced on the planter capitalists, even within the larger setback for liberation during the fall of Black Reconstruction, was the semi-feudal sharecropping system. Where families tilled fields and raised their children without white overseers although under the onerous class conditions of a defeated communal nation... "New Afrikan women's strategy back then grew spontaneously out of their daily lives, their experiences and needs. Not out of some textbook or some political protest routine. Stubbornly living communal culture and fighting capitalism is often ignored or dismissed as "impractical." Yet and again, it was that partial strategy by women back then that proved most useful in real life. Still, it did not make that very difficult hurdle from the level of spontaneous breakout to the level of conscious strategy. In which analysis, tentative strategic understanding, new tactics & practice, criticism of results, and then the emergence of new strategy, all flow in a continuous dialectical circle of struggle. And those partial women's struggles & victories, great as they were, underline the reality that if you don't have a strategy to end a war then someone else will usually end it for you. But you won't like it. "All these earlier battles throughout the New Afrikan nation still throw light for us on the latest battlefield. And on battles certain to come."