Anarchism and anti-fascism
By: Alex Cypher
Tags: Communism, Boogaloo Boys, Anarchism, Antifa, Antifash Gordon

You can be forgiven for thinking I had a bad attitude towards anarchism based on my early articles concerning vanguardism and the USSR, and a post from around last year where I concerned CHAZ to be a case study refuting anarchism. But I am a Libertarian Marxist, and although that comes from a different theoretical tradition to the movement called Anarchism, and so it assesses the world differently from the way anarchism does, I notice that historically anarchists actually don’t actually seem to have had too much bad blood with Libertarian Marxists. In fact, they are often sympathetic to Libertarian Marxism, and Libertarian Marxists like Karl Korsch, Daniel Guerin, and Andre Breton have been sympathetic to anarchism themselves, and I must admit I can read Mikhail Bakunin on freedom and find him striking a chord with me despite everything.

But this post isn’t supposed to be a romance about the merits of anarchism, although I could mention that I’m much more skeptical than ever towards the state. Instead it’s about the way self-proclaimed anti-fascists seem to treat anarchists as “crypto-fascists”. Can you believe it?

I refer of course principally to something I saw today from Antifash Gordon, a famous self-styled Antifa Twitter account who, I should mention, has also been accused last month of abusing other anti-fascist activists. In a tweet he posted (featuring the above image), Gordon accused the Boogaloo Boys trying to “co-opt” anti-fascism by declaring public hatred of “tankies”, and proceeding to call on other anti-fascists to bully “these crypto-fascist nerds”.

Now, for such a simple statement, there’s a lot to go through. For starters, the people he’s referring to appear to be anarchists. The logo on the back says “Reject All Authority”, which alongside the terms “Antifascist” and “Anti-Tankie” is a very clear reference to anarchist ideology, and the tag “Hoist the Black Flag” above it is another blatant reference to Anarchism. It’s not unfeasible to see fascists attempt to co-opt ostensibly non-fascist movements on the left. After all, we know that eco-fascists were busy trying to infiltrate Extinction Rebellion in order to impersonate them. But of all the things for fascists to try and infiltrate, it seems strange to think that Anarchism would be one of them. Anarchism stands utterly and diametrically opposed to everything fascism stands for ideologically, anarchists are consequently very hostile to fascists as well as anyone who they simply perceive to be fascists, and it does not take much for them to suspect the influence and infiltration of fascistic elements. It seems difficult to imagine fascists having much success getting deep into anarchist movements as a result.

But this is the Boogaloo Boys we’re talking about, and that tends to make things complicated and problematic for many people. Technically, the Boogaloos are just a radical anti-government movement that lots of different people, of different political persuasions, can identify with, and in practice almost anyone can. They’re mostly distinguished by their practically uniform support for gun ownership and opposition to restrictions thereof, the equally uniform aesthetic of wearing Hawaiian shirts everywhere, and their general belief that the US government as it stands is tyrannical and should be overthrown, as well as a broad belief that civil war is set to take place in the not-too-distant future. While there are high profile cases of far-right Boogaloo activists holding white supremacist beliefs (most notable a belief in race war), there are also many Boogaloos who reject those views entirely. Magnus Panvidya, who I’m sure is as thrilled as any other anarchist about being declared a “crypto-fascist” by some sex pest on Twitter and who I have previously described as an “anarcho-capitalist”, can attest to a broadly socially libertarian (and at that broadly “progressive”) outlook, and he tends to adopt a mix of voluntaryist libertarianism such as found more commonly on the libertarian right, and the ideas of Murray Bookchin from the libertarian left. And on top of that many Boogaloos, including Magnus, have participated in Black Lives Matter protests and espoused broadly anti-racist views. It doesn’t make sense that a movement that is supposedly broadly white supremacist would have any kind of positive agenda for a movement rallying in solidarity with black people who were killed in police custody, such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. You would expect white supremacists to have a habit of mocking George Floyd’s death and celebrating Derek Chauvin, the officer found guilty of his murder, not providing security for Black Lives Matter protests. And sure, they’ve done security gigs for anti-lockdown protests too, which are dominated by the hard right, but this in itself is hardly proof of white supremacist leanings, and if anything can be taken as very consistent with broad radical libertarianism.

I suppose this brings us to the only reason left to denounce people like Magnus and the Boogaloo anarchists as “crypto-fascists”. Their hatred of tankies. “Tankie” is a term that originated in the Communist Party of Britain, some of whose membership came to oppose the Soviet Union after it invaded Hungary in 1956. When Peter Fryer, who at the time was a member of the party and a journalist writing for its paper The Daily Worker, came back from Hungary at around that time to write about the repression that he thought was horrific and unjustifiable, the party sought to suppress his writings, because they undermined their party line of unquestioned support for the Soviet Union — the party supported Moscow’s line that the Hungarian uprisings were a fascist counter-revolution, and censored any members who contradicted them. This action led the CPB and similar Marxist-Leninists to be referred to as “tankies”, defenders of the Soviet policy of sending in tanks to crush dissenting socialist states, and in the decades since the term has more or less evolved in practice into a deragtory term for Marxist-Leninists almost in general, typically by anarchists, libertarian socialists, or simply non-ML leftists who distrust Marxist-Leninists, due to apparent tendencies to support authoritarian and imperialist states so long as they call themselves socialist or even simply oppose America or NATO without even pretending to be socialist alongside that. Many modern Marxist-Leninists, of course, also use the term themselves to refer to people within their movement who defend actions carried out by the Soviet Union that otherwise contradict their ideological principles, such as perpetuating imperialism abroad or enacting policies that they believe amount to the restoration of capitalism.

For the case of Antifash Gordon, however, it’s not so hard to figure out what he means by “tankie”. He means MLs in general, he means the more authoritarian wing of the Marxist movement, he may even believe that “tankie” just means “Communist” full stop, and in any case, for him, if you have any problem with Marxism-Leninism or authoritarian state socialism, then that makes you a fascist. But why would it? After all, there is tradition of left-wing criticism of the Soviet Union that has been around since not long after the birth of the Soviet Union itself. Democratic socialists (Marxist ones, at that), council communists, syndicalists, anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and ecosocialists have all criticized the Soviet Union throughout its exitence and after its collapse, and their criticisms still have great currency within the radical left today. Are these people all to be denounced as “fascists” just because of that? The only reason your answer would be yes is if you have a fanatical ideological commitment to the Soviet Union as a model for socialism. But we’re left to assume that’s what Antifash Gordon believes, and if you look at many of the comments for his tweet you’ll find plenty of comments undersigning his opinion. Of course you’ll also find a surprising amount of people defending him from accusations of abuse, so there’s room to speculate he has quite the cult of personality going on the online left.

So apparently, for certain contingents of the Antifa movement, and keep in mind there is no absolute ideological orthodoxy within Antifa that doesn’t extend beyond militant opposition to fascism or the far-right more generally, anarchism is crypto-fascist due to its opposition to authoritarian forms of Marxism (or their broadly mistaken view that Marxism itself is inherently authoritarian), and thus being an anarchist means being a crypto-fascist. You’d think this would be a problem for Antifa considering that many anarchists identify with the Antifa movement, and in fact you would be hard-pressed to find anarchists who didn’t identify with or support Antifa to some extent or another. Moreover, one of the main symbols of Antifa movements is the three arrows symbol, which you may remember was originally a symbol created by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and it was intended to just be a symbol of opposition to authoritarianism in general, just that they happened to consider communism to be authoritarian, no doubt a reference to the Bolshevism that unfortunately became the dominant current in the communist movement. But this is all to be ignored by certain Antifa contingents like Antifash Gordon.

Of course, Antifash Gordon doesn’t represent all of Antifa. He can’t. That’s the very nature of the movement. But that’s also something to keep in mind when people like him go after anarchists for having Hawaiian shirt designs. There’s no leadership in the Boogaloo movement anymore than there is “leadership” in Antifa, as I’m sure some right-wing crackpot boomer would have you believe. So who represents who there, and who represents who with a leaderless movement like Antifa. I would hope that the answer to that is not Gordon, though I can already assume that the allegations heading his way will ensure that my hopes will not be misplaced.