The orginal Antifa
Jul 22, 2019 16:06:31 #
72 years after the triumph over Nazism, we look back to postwar Germany, when socialists gave birth to Antifa.
Scene from the 1932 Antifaschistische Aktion conference.
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The Zone Defense
Samuel Stein
A Plan to Win Socialism In America
Peter Gowan
Here’s What Bernie Could Do in Power
Meagan Day
In Defense of Public Housing
Karen Narefsky
The origins of the word “antifa” — shorthand for decentralized, militant street activism associated with its own aesthetic and subculture — might be murky to most readers. Even in Germany, few know much about the popular forms of antifascist resistance that coined the term.
The movement’s short but inspiring political legacy proved too uncomfortable for both Cold War-era German states, and was ignored in schools and mainstream history. Today its legacy is almost entirely lost to the Left.
Out of the Ruins
By 1945, Hitler’s Third Reich lay physically destroyed and politically exhausted. Basic civil society ceased to function in many areas, as the Nazi grip on power faltered and regime supporters, particularly in the middle- and upper classes, realized that Hitler’s “final victory” was a fantasy.
On the Left, many Communists and Social Democrats had either been outright murdered by the Nazis, or died in the ensuing war. The unimaginable human and material destruction wrought by Nazi rule killed millions and turned German society upside down, decimating the labor movement and murdering most of the country’s Jewish population. Millions who had supported or at least acquiesced to the regime — including many workers and even some former socialists — now faced a new beginning in unknown political terrain.
Yet despite its failure to stop Hitler in 1933 and veritable dismantling in subsequent years, Germany’s socialist labor movement and its decidedly progressive traditions outlived Hitler in the factories of its industrial cities, and began gathering up the fragments as soon as open political activity became possible. As historian Gareth Dale describes:
Of all sectors of the population, it was industrial workers in the major towns that showed the greatest immunity to Nazism. Many trade unionists and socialists were able to maintain their traditions and beliefs, at least in some form, through the Nazi era. A courageous minority, including some 150,000 Communists, took part in illegal resistance. Wider layers avoided danger but were able to keep labour movement values and memories alive amongst groups of friends, in workplaces and on housing estates.
These groups, oftentimes launched from the aforementioned housing estates, were generally called “Antifaschistische Ausschüsse,” “Antifaschistische Kommittees,” or the now famous “Antifaschistische Aktion” – “Antifa” for short. They drew on the slogans and orientation of the prewar united front strategy, adopting the word “Antifa” from a last-ditch attempt to establish a cross-party alliance between Communist and Social Democratic workers in 1932. The alliance’s iconic logo, devised by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, has been since become one of the Left’s most well-known symbols.
After the war, Antifas varied in size and composition across the former Reich, now divided into four zones of occupation, and developed in interaction with the local occupying power. Emerging seemingly overnight in dozens of cities, most formed immediately after Allied forces arrived, while some such as the group in Wuppertal “liberated” themselves in street battles with Hitler loyalists before the Allies could.
Pivotally, these circles were not spontaneous instances of solidarization between traumatized war survivors, but the product of Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD) veterans reactivating prewar networks. Albrecht Lein reports that the core of the Braunschweig Antifa was made up of KPD and SPD members in their forties and fifties who had avoided the front, though Catholic workers’ organizations and other forces were also involved.
The Antifa groups numbered between several hundred and several thousand active members in most cities, while the openly decried lack of youth involvement can be ascribed to twelve years of Nazi education and socialization, which annihilated the once widespread proletarian-socialist attitude among most young Germans. Though the material needs of war and reconstruction incorporated women into economic life in new ways, the male dominance characteristic of German society at the time was also reflected in the Antifa movement, which consisted largely (but not entirely) of men.
Antifas tended to focus on a combination of hunting down Nazi criminals and underground Nazi partisans (the so-called “Werewolves”) and practical concerns affecting the general population. Braunschweig’s Antifa, for example, printed a twelve-point program demanding, among other things, the removal of Nazis from all administrative bodies and their immediate replacement with “competent antifascists,” liquidation of Nazi assets to provide for war victims, emergency laws to prosecute local fascists, and the reestablishment of the public health-care service. Typical of an organization led by socialists and thus keenly aware of the need for print media as an organizing medium, the program’s twelfth and final point consisted bluntly of a “Daily newspaper.”
Although surviving records indicate that many Antifas were dominated by the KPD, the political mood in the early months was far from the “Third Period” adventurism of the late Weimar period. Across the board, local Antifas were motivated by a desire to learn from the mistakes of 1933 and build a non-sectarian labor movement bridging divisions. This was buoyed by a widespread sense at the war’s end that the horrors of Nazism had been a result of the instability and inequality of capitalism, and that a new, egalitarian economic system was needed for the postwar order.
Demands for nationalization of industry and other left-wing policies were widespread. Even the forced marriage between KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the Soviet zone drew on this sentiment and recruited many former oppositionists in the first year. In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare:
The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers’ parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions.
The rest of the document consisted of practical demands around which to unite Hamburg’s fragmented labor movement.
Antifas enjoyed varying degrees of success depending on the composition of the local movement and the amount of leeway allowed to them by occupying powers. Despite forming outside of the Allied administration and pushing forward popular de-Nazification policies against occupying forces who sought reconciliation with the old authorities, they were in no position to contest Allied hegemony and represented militant minorities at best.
The southwestern industrial city of Stuttgart, for example, was fortunate enough to be involved in territorial maneuvering between the United States and France, which occupied the city preemptively. Keen to avoid civil unrest and thus give the Americans a pretext to take it back, French authorities allowed Stuttgart’s antifascists considerable leeway in dismantling the Nazi-era German Labor Front (DAF), rebuilding shop-floor organization in the factories, and organizing the population in cross-party antifascist alliances.
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germany-cold-war
Scene from the 1932 Antifaschistische Aktion conference.
Our new issue, on the housing crisis and capitalism, is out now. Get a discounted subscription today.
The Zone Defense
Samuel Stein
A Plan to Win Socialism In America
Peter Gowan
Here’s What Bernie Could Do in Power
Meagan Day
In Defense of Public Housing
Karen Narefsky
The origins of the word “antifa” — shorthand for decentralized, militant street activism associated with its own aesthetic and subculture — might be murky to most readers. Even in Germany, few know much about the popular forms of antifascist resistance that coined the term.
The movement’s short but inspiring political legacy proved too uncomfortable for both Cold War-era German states, and was ignored in schools and mainstream history. Today its legacy is almost entirely lost to the Left.
Out of the Ruins
By 1945, Hitler’s Third Reich lay physically destroyed and politically exhausted. Basic civil society ceased to function in many areas, as the Nazi grip on power faltered and regime supporters, particularly in the middle- and upper classes, realized that Hitler’s “final victory” was a fantasy.
On the Left, many Communists and Social Democrats had either been outright murdered by the Nazis, or died in the ensuing war. The unimaginable human and material destruction wrought by Nazi rule killed millions and turned German society upside down, decimating the labor movement and murdering most of the country’s Jewish population. Millions who had supported or at least acquiesced to the regime — including many workers and even some former socialists — now faced a new beginning in unknown political terrain.
Yet despite its failure to stop Hitler in 1933 and veritable dismantling in subsequent years, Germany’s socialist labor movement and its decidedly progressive traditions outlived Hitler in the factories of its industrial cities, and began gathering up the fragments as soon as open political activity became possible. As historian Gareth Dale describes:
Of all sectors of the population, it was industrial workers in the major towns that showed the greatest immunity to Nazism. Many trade unionists and socialists were able to maintain their traditions and beliefs, at least in some form, through the Nazi era. A courageous minority, including some 150,000 Communists, took part in illegal resistance. Wider layers avoided danger but were able to keep labour movement values and memories alive amongst groups of friends, in workplaces and on housing estates.
These groups, oftentimes launched from the aforementioned housing estates, were generally called “Antifaschistische Ausschüsse,” “Antifaschistische Kommittees,” or the now famous “Antifaschistische Aktion” – “Antifa” for short. They drew on the slogans and orientation of the prewar united front strategy, adopting the word “Antifa” from a last-ditch attempt to establish a cross-party alliance between Communist and Social Democratic workers in 1932. The alliance’s iconic logo, devised by Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists members Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, has been since become one of the Left’s most well-known symbols.
After the war, Antifas varied in size and composition across the former Reich, now divided into four zones of occupation, and developed in interaction with the local occupying power. Emerging seemingly overnight in dozens of cities, most formed immediately after Allied forces arrived, while some such as the group in Wuppertal “liberated” themselves in street battles with Hitler loyalists before the Allies could.
Pivotally, these circles were not spontaneous instances of solidarization between traumatized war survivors, but the product of Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD) veterans reactivating prewar networks. Albrecht Lein reports that the core of the Braunschweig Antifa was made up of KPD and SPD members in their forties and fifties who had avoided the front, though Catholic workers’ organizations and other forces were also involved.
The Antifa groups numbered between several hundred and several thousand active members in most cities, while the openly decried lack of youth involvement can be ascribed to twelve years of Nazi education and socialization, which annihilated the once widespread proletarian-socialist attitude among most young Germans. Though the material needs of war and reconstruction incorporated women into economic life in new ways, the male dominance characteristic of German society at the time was also reflected in the Antifa movement, which consisted largely (but not entirely) of men.
Antifas tended to focus on a combination of hunting down Nazi criminals and underground Nazi partisans (the so-called “Werewolves”) and practical concerns affecting the general population. Braunschweig’s Antifa, for example, printed a twelve-point program demanding, among other things, the removal of Nazis from all administrative bodies and their immediate replacement with “competent antifascists,” liquidation of Nazi assets to provide for war victims, emergency laws to prosecute local fascists, and the reestablishment of the public health-care service. Typical of an organization led by socialists and thus keenly aware of the need for print media as an organizing medium, the program’s twelfth and final point consisted bluntly of a “Daily newspaper.”
Although surviving records indicate that many Antifas were dominated by the KPD, the political mood in the early months was far from the “Third Period” adventurism of the late Weimar period. Across the board, local Antifas were motivated by a desire to learn from the mistakes of 1933 and build a non-sectarian labor movement bridging divisions. This was buoyed by a widespread sense at the war’s end that the horrors of Nazism had been a result of the instability and inequality of capitalism, and that a new, egalitarian economic system was needed for the postwar order.
Demands for nationalization of industry and other left-wing policies were widespread. Even the forced marriage between KPD and SPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the Soviet zone drew on this sentiment and recruited many former oppositionists in the first year. In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare:
The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers’ parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions.
The rest of the document consisted of practical demands around which to unite Hamburg’s fragmented labor movement.
Antifas enjoyed varying degrees of success depending on the composition of the local movement and the amount of leeway allowed to them by occupying powers. Despite forming outside of the Allied administration and pushing forward popular de-Nazification policies against occupying forces who sought reconciliation with the old authorities, they were in no position to contest Allied hegemony and represented militant minorities at best.
The southwestern industrial city of Stuttgart, for example, was fortunate enough to be involved in territorial maneuvering between the United States and France, which occupied the city preemptively. Keen to avoid civil unrest and thus give the Americans a pretext to take it back, French authorities allowed Stuttgart’s antifascists considerable leeway in dismantling the Nazi-era German Labor Front (DAF), rebuilding shop-floor organization in the factories, and organizing the population in cross-party antifascist alliances.
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/antifascist-movements-hitler-nazis-kpd-spd-germany-cold-war
Jul 22, 2019 16:21:24 #
bmac32 wrote:
72 years after the triumph over Nazism, we look ba... (show quote)
This group of antifa that we have today here in America would get their ass whooped by the brownshirts in Nazi Germany that didn't scare them then they would probably get killed by the black shirts because we know who the black shirts are those are the SS Stormtroopers and you didn't want to see them see the antifa or the brown shirts were the thuggish arm of the Nazi Empire and the black shirts were the death squads literally you got a knock on your door and you saw them black shirts you were dead there was no pleading for your life! All we got in antifa now or college students and college professors masquerading as antifa how come is it you never see antifa come any further south cuz I guarantee you they wouldn't last one second here in the South they would get their asses whooped on a daily basis we don't put up with that trash for one we don't put up with commies. It's a sad State of Affairs there ought to be masking laws so these people have to unmask themselves so they can be tried for their High crimes misdemeanors because what they are doing is treasonous they are nothing but traitors just go ask the ice agent that shot the last antifa person who wrote that stupid manifest oh yeah he wasn't feeling so lucky then now was he got killed that's exactly what's going to happen if they come down south and they try to pull this b******* they will die no they're the arm that's trying to start a Civil War in this country but we on the right are going to allow that to happen because they don't want us to fight back because if we end up fighting back they're going to get killed and most of them don't want to die they just want to act like they're part of a mob so they can go back home to Mommy's basement! I think what we should do is pass masking laws where people can't wear masks so they can be tried for their crimes that's what we need in this case that way they can sit there and say what they want to but they have to be unmasked to do it.
Jul 22, 2019 16:32:31 #
And who backs the? George Soros.
77Reaganite wrote:
This group of antifa that we have today here in Am... (show quote)
Jul 22, 2019 17:05:17 #
It does appears Soros and his organizations have paid up once again and the Beverly Hills Antifa Chapter is out running full force again. The chapter just recently tweeted out a new training video for new members. These creeps remind me of MoveOn.org
bmac32 wrote:
And who backs the? George Soros.
Jul 22, 2019 17:40:42 #
77Reaganite wrote:
This group of antifa that we have today here in Am... (show quote)
If your on a good mission that won’t bring harm to anyone, why would you want to hide your light under a hood and mask? Of course they’re evil. The government should set the army on them. We need our soldiers here.
Jul 23, 2019 10:12:50 #
77Reaganite wrote:
This group of antifa that we have today here in Am... (show quote)
Why would you think that the fearless Social Justice Warriors of Antifa are afraid to come down here to Georgia? They have already proven their courage by jumping on people and beating them as long as they have them outnumbered ten to one. Do you think they are afraid they might bring a baseball bat to a gunfight?
I think we ought to send them an invitation to hold a rally in, say, South Atlanta. or damn near anywhere in NW GA. Then they can prove how brave they are.
Jul 23, 2019 10:31:22 #
I've heard several republicans condemn them but not one democrat.
This weekend a crazed Antifa bomber attacked the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. The bomber set a car ablaze and attempted to blow up a propane tank before Tacoma police killed him. The mad Antifa bomber was hailed as a folk hero by Leftist activists across America. Even more shocking was the fact that elected Democrat officials have failed to condemn what was clearly a domestic terror attack.
This weekend a crazed Antifa bomber attacked the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. The bomber set a car ablaze and attempted to blow up a propane tank before Tacoma police killed him. The mad Antifa bomber was hailed as a folk hero by Leftist activists across America. Even more shocking was the fact that elected Democrat officials have failed to condemn what was clearly a domestic terror attack.
Smedley_buzkill wrote:
Why would you think that the fearless Social Justice Warriors of Antifa are afraid to come down here to Georgia? They have already proven their courage by jumping on people and beating them as long as they have them outnumbered ten to one. Do you think they are afraid they might bring a baseball bat to a gunfight?
I think we ought to send them an invitation to hold a rally in, say, South Atlanta. or damn near anywhere in NW GA. Then they can prove how brave they are.
I think we ought to send them an invitation to hold a rally in, say, South Atlanta. or damn near anywhere in NW GA. Then they can prove how brave they are.
Jul 24, 2019 16:38:33 #
Smedley_buzkill wrote:
Why would you think that the fearless Social Justice Warriors of Antifa are afraid to come down here to Georgia? They have already proven their courage by jumping on people and beating them as long as they have them outnumbered ten to one. Do you think they are afraid they might bring a baseball bat to a gunfight?
I think we ought to send them an invitation to hold a rally in, say, South Atlanta. or damn near anywhere in NW GA. Then they can prove how brave they are.
I think we ought to send them an invitation to hold a rally in, say, South Atlanta. or damn near anywhere in NW GA. Then they can prove how brave they are.
Antifa having special ops. guys train them doesn't mean much to me. If they came to Ohio it would be special ops., vs special ops. One variable, I wouldn't be alone this time, 26 others, probably more if I made a call, but not him. I do trust a guy in Colorado, who knows if it would happen. Just remember the quick-dry cement has a cancer-causing element in it. It could also hide Meningitis.
Jul 24, 2019 20:13:03 #
Lt. Rob Polans ret. wrote:
Antifa having special ops. guys train them doesn't mean much to me. If they came to Ohio it would be special ops., vs special ops. One variable, I wouldn't be alone this time, 26 others, probably more if I made a call, but not him. I do trust a guy in Colorado, who knows if it would happen. Just remember the quick-dry cement has a cancer-causing element in it. It could also hide Meningitis.
Special Ops? What, how to make a half assed pipe bomb?
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