Class 9: Movements
Counter-mobilisation
Antifa origins and modern incarnations
- Emerged in Germany in 1930s among many initiatives to oppose SA and NSDAP (e.g., Sewell 2020)
Antifa origins and modern incarnations
Emerged in Germany in 1930s among many initiatives to oppose SA and NSDAP (e.g., Sewell 2020)
Re-emerged in post-war era
- institutionalised forms, e.g., Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten (VVN-BdA), Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI)
- state endorsement, e.g., 2024: Italian President Sergio Mattarella states that Italian constitution is ‘anti-fascist’
Antifa origins and modern incarnations
- Today:
- organised antifascist activism is widespread (Bray 2017; Copsey 2017)
- Opposed to ‘fascist’ forces with varying tightness/looseness of defining that
- Commonly, loose organisations (anarchist tendencies)
- Repertoire of actions: counter-protest, low-level violence, property damage, doxxing
The Sticker War
A Serbian antifa named Stefan waged a similar campaign on his own in 2012: When he came upon wheat-pasted posters from the fascist Serbian Action in his neighborhood of Belgrade, he immediately tore them down … and noticed them back up again an hour later. He retaliated by plastering antifa stickers all over the Serbian Action posters … only to find Serbian Action stickers in favor of “Traditional courtship in marriage” and other conservative slogans plastered on top of his stickers in response. Every day for six months Stefan battled with an anonymous fascist for control of his neighborhood. About four months into the conflict Stefan saw a guy putting up a sticker down the street as he got off the bus. The two locked eyes but Stefan wasn’t sure if this was his nemesis. In any event, Stefan persisted, and eventually the Serbian Action propaganda ceased to appear. He simply outlasted them.
p121: The street art campaigns, whether posters or graffiti, ultimately serve to designate space as antifascist (Creasap 2016; Gerbaudo 2013; Waldner and Dobratz 2013). An antifascist tag or sticker in a dive bar signifies the space as welcoming to activists and hostile to fascists. Antifa posters or stickers on lamp posts or walls in a community show that at minimum there is an active militant antifascist group operating in the area.
Vysotsky, S. (2020). American Antifa: The tactics, culture, and practice of militant antifascism. Routledge.
