I also do not want to characterize antifa activists as the ethico-political, "mirror-image" equivalent of fascists. No, "both sides" are not equally "evil" (a word that should be excised from the vocabulary of secular leftism). What you are fighting for is more important than the tactics you choose, and those who fight for equality are not as bad as those who advocate racism, no matter what tactics they may share.
As can any well-meaning activists, however, they can be stupider, and, in specific contexts, more dangerous to the political goals of the egalitarian and socialist left than some right-wing actors. Their tactics and strategy can work to impede the urgent and crucial task for the American left--that of building mass political support.
I think that Antifa activists are fighting a battle against an enemy deserving of contempt, but undeserving of the attention and intense energy being directed against it, energy on which that enemy only feeds. In the process, they are ignoring other, more crucial battles against powerful and dangerous enemies, and throwing away a crucial tool (free speech) needed to fight all those enemies. For me, antifa action falls into the category defined by one of history's shrewdest quips: "It's worse than a crime; it's an error."
Nor does my position derive from an absolute insistence on "non-violence." In fact, I dislike the casual "imaginary pacifism" that crops up repeatedly as a constituent of American liberal and leftish ideology, and I have made this point emphatically in a number of essays on Counterpunch and on my web site, in the course of making a left argument for gun rights. The radical social and political changes we need to make in this country will require combat of many kinds against entrenched powers who never have and never will concede to moral suasion alone. I maintain the perspective that a socialist movement doesn't just seek to express itself, but to win the battle for democratic power, and that, whether it ever comes to it or not, a serious revolutionary movement must be prepared to use force to win that battle.
Indeed, we should recognize that the most militant and effective of "non-violent" tactics are themselves uses of physical force (a word I prefer to "violence"), however self-limited. Sit-ins, with people linking arms or chaining themselves to, each other or to immovable objects, are attempts to force, with bodies, changes of policy. Everybody understands the passive-aggression of: "To protest an injustice, we're going to disrupt some necessary social function, provoking you to manhandle us. We want to use the perceived righteousness of our passivity vs. your aggression to help demonstrate the righteousness of what we are seeking vs. what you are defending." Doesn't everyone cotton on to this now that rightists are starting to do it?
In many ways, traditional non-violent protest tactics--even mass demonstrations--are showing their limits. At this point, everybody in America has seen this play a thousand times, and probably been in it a few. All the characters know their marks, their lines, and their cues. The regime is completely familiar with it, and for the most part controls the production from curtain to curtain. I certainly have no more interest in going to demonstrations where I'm literally penned in for hours. There's nothing in that which threatens the political, let alone the socio-economic, regime in any serious way.
So, it's not the antifa willingness to fight, or even to start a fight when necessary, that's a problem. Who starts the fight, and who uses which weapons, is not as important as what they're fighting for, and whether their fighting strategy is more likely to help win or lose the decisive battle.
So, yes, we need a new, much more challenging, script, and groups like Black Bloc, Redneck Revolt, and antifa are making us all think about it.
But we are just beginning to think about that, and, even though militant non-violent resistance cannot by itself revolutionize entrenched state-supported political and socio-economic structures, it is still a powerful political tactic--very effective for building popular support against unjust and oppressive ideologies and practices, by state and non-state actors. That's because, despite any demurrals of cross-bearing clergy or stick-wielding antifa, it is a use of political and physical force, and should be respected as such. In some form, it is still the most effective mode of protest available for leftists, no matter how radical their goals, in the United States today.
The crucial element in all of the above is building popular support, the most potent and important weapon for revolutionary struggle; and the most important target for that struggle is the capitalist state, with its policies and structures , which comprises the most powerful and pernicious agent of injustice and destruction. In terms of that task, I think the left in America--by which I mean committed socialist (or at least anti-capitalist) leftists who are well over Democratic Party capitalist and imperialist "liberalism"--has to take as its starting point Adolph Reed Jr.'s injunction:
The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one. ".There are no magical interventions, shortcuts, or technical fixes. We need to reject the fantasy that some spark will ignite the People to move as a mass. We must create a constituency for a left program -- and that cannot occur via MSNBC or blog posts or the New York Times. It requires painstaking organization and building relationships with people outside the Beltway and comfortable leftist groves.
It cannot occur via antifa tactics, either. Sucker-punching tactics are not the new spark that will ignite the people's revolutionary fervor. It's foolish to think that the failure of previous non-violent protests to change state structures can be blamed on the failure of the tactics, rather than the failure of the underlying politics in other domains. Those mass movements either did not achieve popular support, or, more poignantly, they did , but that support was coopted and channeled into an electoral theater and a political leadership that undermined and effectively annulled their goals, and turned energetic popular opposition back into apathy and acceptance. The transition from millions of antiwar protestors on the streets against the Vietnam and Iraq wars to
Anitfa tactics do nothing to overcome that. In fact, antifa is usually fighting for principles that have widespread, biparitsan national acceptance, and in venues where they are supported not only by the population, but by government authority and political elites.
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