Eternal Antifascism

The debate over the terms “fascism” and “antifascism” has by now become a tradition in Germany and remains a constant fixture on the socio-political agenda. Across the German-speaking world, countless associations, initiatives, alliances, and foundations have dedicated themselves to the fight against fascism. Under the self-appointed label “antifascism,” in all its variations, people take a stand and legitimize their own moral standing.

At the same time, antifascism has become an established field of civil society – and increasingly a publicly funded one. The federal program „Demokratie leben!“ (“Living Democracy”), run by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, has channeled millions in tax money into anti-fascist projects every year since 2015. At the same time, a permanent battle rages over who gets to define the term. With considerable hostility and vitriol, the political camps regularly confront each other and accuse one another of harboring fascist tendencies.

But who ultimately gets to decide what fascism and antifascism are? Shouldn’t we, as a civil society, be capable of arriving at an objective definition – one independent of time and place? Shouldn’t we be able to define these terms independently of party affiliation, day-to-day politics, and whatever majority opinion happens to prevail at the moment? Ideally, we should be able to recognize fascism when we encounter it – free of the costume of daily political noise that may surround it.

A structural definition

Look up the term fascism in Duden, Germany’s standard dictionary, and you’ll find that it describes a nationalist, anti-democratic, far-right ideology organized around the leader principle – in other words, a form of totalitarian rule. But since terms like “totalitarian,” “anti-democratic,” and “far-right” are themselves understood very differently from person to person, we want to choose a less abstract definition.

Most people would probably agree that fascism is a form of xenophobia – hostility toward foreign worldviews, cultures, ways of life, nationalities, or religious beliefs. In this sense, “foreign” describes a worldview that deviates from one’s own, independent of state travel documents or place of birth.

This xenophobia, in turn, plays out as a social power structure. Every fascist social order shares two clear defining features. First, one part of a society imposes its own worldview on another part of that society. This happens through violence and coercion. Logically, at least one part of society must harbor hostility and contempt toward the worldview of the rest of society – otherwise there would be no reason to impose one’s own worldview on the other group in the first place. Second, the dynamic of that society exhibits a relationship of authority and obedience. Only when the majority of society accepts these power relations will they also be durably enforced.

In a fascist form of society, a worldview is thus enforced through violence and coercion, embedded in a relationship of authority and obedience.

This definition is deliberately decoupled from historical eras and individual figures. Only a description independent of place and time allows fascism to be recognized here and now, possibly in new forms and colors.

Even so, the structural definition chosen here aligns with the thinking of the Frankfurt School and Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism. Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School developed the so-called F-Scale in “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950) – a psychological instrument measuring an individual’s susceptibility to authoritarian, proto-fascist attitudes. That work engages in detail with the dynamic of authority and obedience within fascist systems.

The features of Umberto Eco’s “eternal fascism” are applied here without any selective filtering. Stripped of historical eras, what emerges behind the term fascism are structural mechanisms within authoritarian power structures. Eco, for instance, describes the appeal to an unexamined, often invented tradition as a source of legitimacy. This exact pattern of reasoning appears the moment one questions the authority-obedience structure of the state itself: there has always been rule, taxation, and a monopoly on violence – so, the argument goes, there must continue to be. In this way, the mere historical continuity of a power structure quietly becomes its own justification.

Eco also speaks of the fear of difference, or the rejection of the foreign. Structurally, this describes the need for a homogeneous society as a general pattern. That need summons a leading party or movement that enforces and embodies the “correct,” homogeneous worldview.

Another feature is an obsession with an enemy conspiracy as a central tool of mobilization. What’s striking is how symmetrically this pattern appears on both sides of the political spectrum in Germany. Both the left and the right mobilize their voters with the same argument: because the other side is supposedly always on the verge of gaining strength and seizing power, one is compelled to seize power first, in order to impose the “good worldview” on everyone else.

This is how the AFA of 1932 fought its own labor movement as an enemy under the “social fascism” thesis, while today’s AfD brands Antifa as a terrorist threat to “domestic peace.” Conversely, large parts of the left-wing party front and the Antifa movement declare the AfD itself to be a fascist danger that must be confronted by any means necessary – including, if need be, state coercion. Both sides invoke a division of society into an irreconcilable friend-enemy scheme, and both use it to rally their own base and to justify coercive measures against the other side.

So what is antifascism?

If the ignorance of other worldviews and the demand to enforce one’s own worldview through violence and coercion – embedded in a socio-political relationship of authority and obedience – are the basic elements of fascist currents, then a clear standard of conduct follows for all self-declared antifascists.

Anyone who wants to call themselves antifascist must, with full consistency, oppose every social system based on violence and coercion – and cannot tolerate any authoritarian power structures.

Yet since all state systems are built on the basis of violence and coercion, and rest on a large-scale dynamic of authority and obedience, all state structures are, in their basic form, fascist. Everyone who walks to the ballot box wants their own worldview imposed on everyone else through violence and coercion. The difference between a democratic majority decision and a fascist dictatorship is a difference of procedure, not of outcome. In both cases, the result is the same: a worldview enforced through the means of the state’s monopoly on violence – compulsory taxation, police, prison – against every individual who never agreed to that outcome. Anyone who refuses to draw this conclusion is applying their own logic selectively.

The antifascist movement in Germany has traditionally had more than just one blind spot regarding this logic. Looking back at German history, the Antifaschistische Aktion (AFA) was founded in 1932 as a front organization of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) – not as a cross-party, anti-authoritarian movement. From the very beginning, it was not about fighting authority, violence, and obedience as such, but rather about the rivalry between a second authoritarian social order based on violence and coercion – namely, communist ideology.

The autonomous Antifa of the 1980s at least deliberately modified the well-known two-flag symbol to distance itself from the KPD tradition. That’s why the best-known Antifa symbol today uses a black flag instead of a red one – a nod to anarchist rather than communist origins. That act of distancing was the right step. But it was never carried through to its logical conclusion.

Today’s Antifa movement has, at least to a large extent, freed itself from the party obedience of the KPD and from communist ideology – but not from obedience to the state. Anyone who positions themselves as militantly and uncompromisingly opposed to right-wing violence – neo-Nazi marches, assaults, organized far-right structures – while simultaneously calling for more policing against the right, tougher bans on organizations, and greater state repression against the AfD, is in truth demanding more of exactly the kind of coercive apparatus that their own definition of fascism should disqualify.

This contradiction became most visible during the recent Covid years. A movement that traditionally maintains a permanent, deep-seated mistrust of the state, the police, and the parliamentary order became, for long stretches, a vocal defender of those very institutions. Slogans from that time such as “We’ll vaccinate all of you” or “Antifa, fully vaccinated” stand as testimony to that stance.

Anyone who takes to the streets in favor of a general vaccine mandate – that is, in favor of the compulsion to submit to a medical procedure on one’s own body, enforced through state coercion – cannot at the same time credibly invoke an antifascism that rejects every coercive enforcement of a worldview. Whether the worldview in question concerns the “purity of the nation” or the “purity of immunity” changes nothing about the underlying structure. Coercion remains coercion, compulsion remains compulsion, authority-obedience remains authority-obedience, fascism remains fascism.

In fairness, it should be noted that this alliance at the time also divided the left-wing scene, and that there were, at least, some voices who recognized the contradiction described here between radical criticism of the state and the demand for more state coercion.

So what would a consistently lived antifascism actually look like?

Agorism as an answer

If neither the state nor a movement that treats the state as its enforcer can deliver a consistent antifascism, the real question emerges: what alternative is there to mere criticism? Agorism, as formulated by Samuel Edward Konkin III, offers a very concrete answer: you don’t fight a coercion-based system by trying to conquer or reshape it, but by systematically starving it of substance – by building parallel, voluntary structures based on trade and cooperation rather than coercion.

In practice, that means: a counter-economy instead of party politics. Cooperative and informal exchange networks instead of applications for state funding. Mutual aid within neighborhoods instead of demands directed at welfare agencies. Gray and black markets, which allow people to survive economically outside of taxed and regulated channels, thereby become not a symptom of criminality but an act of resistance against a coercion-based system. Decentralized, state-uncontrollable means of payment belong to this picture as well, as do free educational and legal-aid structures existing outside state institutions.

The decisive difference from the conventional understanding of antifascism lies in its direction: it’s not about asking the state to suppress “the right people,” but about freeing yourself and others from dependence on a system that, by this analysis, itself carries a fascist basic structure – regardless of which party happens to be running it at any given moment.

Antifascism must never rely on state power, because in doing so it makes itself guilty of the very thing it claims to oppose.

Conclusion

Fascism, thought through to its logical conclusion, is not a label for a particular party or a particular historical era, but a structure: violence and coercion used to enforce a worldview, carried by a relationship of authority and obedience. This structure is found not only on the far right, but within the state itself – and, as the history of the AFA from 1932 to the vaccine-mandate mobilization during Covid shows, again and again within movements that see themselves as its opponents.

Consistent antifascism is therefore not a fight for control of the machinery of violence, but the gradual construction of a society that can do without it.