Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Wednesday 12 April 2023 14.00 - 16.00
H-3 POL03 Anarchism and Global Antifascist Politics
B33
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Kirwin Shaffer
Organizer: Tom Goyens Discussants: -
Spencer Beswick : Anarchist Anti-Fascism: Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action in the Late Twentieth Century
Since Donald Trump’s 2016 election, “antifa” has become the new bogeyman of the far right in the United States. Yet despite its sudden growth in popular consciousness, the set of militant anti-fascist tactics known as antifa has a long history beginning with opposition to fascism in the 1920s-30s. Contemporary US ... (Show more)
Since Donald Trump’s 2016 election, “antifa” has become the new bogeyman of the far right in the United States. Yet despite its sudden growth in popular consciousness, the set of militant anti-fascist tactics known as antifa has a long history beginning with opposition to fascism in the 1920s-30s. Contemporary US antifa was born in the late 1980s when anarchists and punks organized Anti-Racist Action (1989-2013) to combat the growth of the white supremacist far right. This history has received new attention since Trump’s election, and Anti-Racist Action has been the subject of multiple recent books, documentaries, and podcasts. But the anarchist politics of the organization and the development of anti-fascist tactics as part of a broader revolutionary anarchist strategy has thus far gone under-examined.

This paper explores revolutionary anti-fascism’s development in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98), which worked closely with Anti-Racist Action and advocated anarchist politics and structures within it. Several key anarchists were leaders in both groups and worked to build each organization simultaneously across North America. Anti-fascism was one of Love and Rage’s three main focuses of activity alongside anti-police activism and Zapatista solidarity organizing. Love and Rage identified their social base as the “reproletarianized” children of the white middle class, which they argued was the potential social base for fascism in the United States. They thus felt that they had a special duty not only to fight fascists in the streets, but also to offer a liberatory alternative for angry young white people looking for radical answers to their problems. This paper argues that anti-fascism was inseparable from anarchism for both Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action. Defeating fascism and white supremacy ultimately necessitated the revolutionary overthrow of the state and capitalism and the construction of a libertarian socialist society. (Show less)

Tom Goyens : Friedrich Kniestedt and Anti-Nazi Politics in Brazil during the 1930s
This paper explores the political activism of Friedrich Kniestedt and the Movement of Anti-Nazi Germans in southern Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s. I explore the role of local action and activism through the periodical press.

Dieter Nelles : Anarchosyndicalism versus Antifacism. The Conflict Between the IWMA and the CNT/FAI during the Spanish Civil War
Immediately after the Barcelona uprising, the CNT/FAI set up an international office headed by the German Augustin Souchy. The office published an information service in several languages, produced radio broadcasts and informed the numerous foreign visitors and journalists in Barcelona about the Spanish revolution. As a sort of "foreign minister," ... (Show more)
Immediately after the Barcelona uprising, the CNT/FAI set up an international office headed by the German Augustin Souchy. The office published an information service in several languages, produced radio broadcasts and informed the numerous foreign visitors and journalists in Barcelona about the Spanish revolution. As a sort of "foreign minister," Souchy made numerous trips abroad to organize support for the CNT/FAI.
After the CNT/FAI entered the government, sharp conflicts arose within the IWMA over the political direction of foreign propaganda. While the small groups of the IWMA advocated a more traditional anarcho-syndicalism, the leading functionaries of the CNT/FAI advocated a broader anti-fascist alliance with left socialist groups in order to mobilize more effective support for the Spanish Republic. The escalating conflict between the CNT/FAI and the IWMA was not resolved until the end of the civil war, and was later forgotten. (Show less)

Kenyon Zimmer : An Accidental Antifascist Network: Deportation, America’s First Red Scare, and Transnational Resistance
When the U.S. government deported more than 1,000 foreign-born radicals in the aftermath of the First World War, it unwittingly expanded and forged new linkages within transnational anarchist and syndicalist movements. With the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, many European deportees drew on their American experiences and connections to ... (Show more)
When the U.S. government deported more than 1,000 foreign-born radicals in the aftermath of the First World War, it unwittingly expanded and forged new linkages within transnational anarchist and syndicalist movements. With the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, many European deportees drew on their American experiences and connections to mobilize against fascism. Their activities took many forms: paramilitary resistance, assassination plots, and participation in the Spanish Civil War; smuggling literature, arms, and people across hardening borders; and less spectacular quotidian forms of resistance. This paper explores how the lasting influence of radical deportees’ time in the United States, as well as the enduring relationships they forged there, shaped and facilitated antifascist networks spanning from North America to Finland, France, Italy, Spain, and beyond. (Show less)



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