Why is the media promoting Antifa?
by Gabriel Black, for
WSWSOver the past week, the anarchist affiliation Antifa (“Anti-fascist”) has received widespread and favorable coverage in the establishment media.
On August 18, the
New York Times, the main newspaper voice for the Democratic Party, published a major front-page feature article, “Antifa Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right.” The piece, written by Thomas Fuller, Alan Feuer, and Serge F. Kovaleski, showcased the views of the movement with interviews of its members.
The article presents Antifa as a serious force for fighting fascism, all but inviting readers to sign up. “Unlike most of the counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville and elsewhere,” the
Times reports, “members of Antifa have shown no qualms about using their fists, sticks or canisters of pepper spray to meet an array of right-wing antagonists whom they call a fascist threahe newspaper interviewed several members of the affiliation, who, the
Timesstates, believe “the ascendant new right in the country requires a physical response.” The quotes are all presented favorably, including one from a self-identified member of Antifa, who argues that “physical confrontation” with nαzι groups is necessary, “because nαzιs and white supremacists are not around to talk.”
The
Times article is not the only example. On August 20, NBC’s “Meet the Press” carried a segment featuring Mark Bray, author of
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Lecturer at Dartmouth.
Bray was also invited to write an op-ed in the
Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The column, “Who are the antifa?,” published on August 17, was in effect a free advertisement, encouraging readers to support or join the movement. One photo caption read, “Antifascists may seem like a novelty, but they’ve been around for a very long time. Maybe we should start listening to them.”
The prominent and sympathetic coverage for Antifa from the
Times, the
Post and NBC is politically sinister. The
Times has a policy of excluding any genuinely left-wing opinion, while “Meet the Press,” the most widely-watched Sunday news program, never interviews or features in its panel discussions anyone outside what is considered acceptable by the political establishment.
At the same time as it is giving favorable coverage to Antifa, the
Times,
Post and other media outlets have collaborated with Google in the effort to suppress genuine left-wing opposition, including the
World Socialist Web Site and other sites.
The promotion of Antifa serves several interrelated functions. First, the physical violence of a handful of protesters in any large demonstration is regularly used as a pretext for police provocation. This is true not only in the US, but in Europe and around the world. Police give the “anti-fascist” and anarchist groups a free hand to carry out provocations, which are then exploited to carry out a violent crackdown.
A Berkeley antifa, courtesy of Zerohedge
The groups themselves are easily infiltrated by police provocateurs, who encourage violent acts for the desired end.
The politics of the various groups that comprise Antifa are, moreover, entirely compatible with those of the Democratic Party, and serve a purpose for that section of the political establishment.
Since before Trump was elected, the Democratic Party has sought to channel widespread popular opposition to Trump behind the military and intelligence apparatus. Indeed, the conflicts within the ruling class since the nαzι rampage in Charlottesville have culminated in the strengthening of the grip of the military and financial elite over the Trump administration. The first product of this restructuring was Trump’s announcement of a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
The Democrats and affiliated media, particularly the
Times, have sought to bury the basic class issues—the fight against social inequality, war, and authoritarianism—through the promotion of a series of diversionary issues.
The
Times has relentlessly promoted the
anti-Russia campaign, seeking to channel mass opposition to Trump behind the demand for more aggressive measures against the government of Vladimir Putin. It has encouraged the conception that the United States is divided by immense racial divisions, promoting both the identity politics of the Democratic Party and providing respectful and even admiring
coverage of what it calls “white nationalists.” It has also prominently featured the
Jacobin magazine, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports the Democratic Party.
The promotion of Antifa conforms to this agenda. Indeed, many of the groups involved in Antifa are essentially factions of the Democratic Party. By Any Means Necessary, BAMN, which is mentioned by name with a link to its website in the
Times article, is among the most fervent advocates of the racialist politics of the Democrats. It received national attention in 2014 for its campaign for Affirmative Action, which was waged in alliance with the Democrats and sections of the corporate elite and military.
Adherents of Antifa claim they are fighting the fascist threat by physically preventing neo-nαzιs from getting a hearing, denying them access to schools and cities where they may reach followers. Ignored, however, is the role of the Democrats and the social and political conditions that create fascism.
The neo-nαzι groups are themselves at present a minuscule social force, unable to organize more than a few hundred people for their major rallies, including the demonstration in Charlottesville. Trump and his fascistic advisers (including the now-departed Stephen Bannon), however, are seeking to exploit political confusion and alienation to develop an extra-parliamentary far-right nationalist movement.
To the extent that a fascist movement will develop, it is because they receive the backing of a section of the ruling elite under conditions in which the policies of the ruling class go unchallenged. That is, it is the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party and its various affiliates, to which Antifa contributes, that creates the ability for fascistic groups to grow.
In terms of its social basis, Antifa attracts disoriented layers particularly among the middle class on the basis of a program compatible with the aims of the Democratic Party and the ruling elite, and which is indifferent and even openly hostile to the mobilization of the working class. It is for this reason that they are being promoted in the media.
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Arrby
With each intensification of far right activity, journos talk about the nascent fascist movement. It’s contradictory. The fascism is intensifying. It isn’t about to begin.
I think that the author is on the right track here, otherwise. Indeed, Reading Zinn’s “A People’s History Of The United States,” teaches me and those who pay attention that the state will always manipulate the people in order to protect itself and the class which it protects. Zinn comes back to the basic tact of giving enough people just enough to tamp down rebellion and create a middle class that will serve as a buffer between it and the abused, abandoned masses. That tact includes channeling working class grievances into electoral politics (death in other words). Also, Zinn quotes authors like Francis Piven and Richard Cloward who present very interesting stats about strikes. It turns out that there were more (wild cat, sit-in) ‘before’ unionization. Why? The ruling class could more easily corrupt a handful of union leaders than the entire working class, and they did. Bosses actually wanted unions because they could control them.
Workers literally had to fight for their rights in the 40s, 50s and 60s. And they often died. They were often simply murdered by the state and the bosses in early times. Those who won rights that we are now losing, but which we had for a while, didn’t win them by saying “Please” to uncaring, unprincipled bosses and their political partners. When Martin Luther King began to come around to Malcolm X’s position that the government and main political parties will always seek to coopt civil rights leaders and activists and render them ineffectual. Shortly afterward, as he was somewhere supporting strikers, he was αssαssιnαtҽd.
So, One can argue with the rightness, or morality, of active resistance to the police state, but, setting that aside and as Gabriel Black helpfully makes plain, Its vital that we know about ‘who’ is actively resisting the police state in our name.
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bevin
‘Antifa’ is a reminder that large parts of the ‘left” in the US will fight anything before actively challenging the imperialist party. The Military Industrial Congressional axis has promoted fascism, internationally, at the cost of millions of lives, for seventy years, during which time the ‘left’. as a whole, has increasingly distanced itself from critics of the warmongers and empire. And, particularly from critics of Zionism.
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Greg Bacon
Isn’t it odd how the Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists violent hate groups–including Christian churches–don’t have any listing for the violent Antifa thugs?
I fear Americans are getting pushed into either submitting to totalitarian assholes like Antifa, who want to take what white Americans have and give it to others, like Antifa, or they’ll have to rise up, a repeat of the cινιℓ ωαr.
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physicsandmathsrevision
The enemy are the people who own the media and who also own AntiFa. The 0.1% arrange that we fight every identitarian group possible except for themselves.
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Palinurus
Hey!
The wsws has been promoting the same policies for marx knows how long, with the expectation, one assumes, of a different outcome vis a vis the elites and capitalism generally. This equates to the definition of lunacy. Try something different, eh?
- Try to stay on topic.
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Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle!
Wrong. Antifa has no overarching strategic outlook for defeating capitalism (or fascism, for that matter). It engages in adventurist and impetuous acts of violence but has no plan for what comes next. Marxist-Leninists, on the other hand, do have such an outlook.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t disapprove of Antifa because it uses violence; I disapprove of it because that violence is not integrated within a broader strategic plan. The issue isn’t “Is violence good or bad?” The issue is “Is this violence actually helping the cause of the working class?” If it isn’t, then it’s objectively bad. If it is, then it’s objectively good.
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August 29, 2017Why is the media promoting Antifa?by Gabriel Black, for WSWS Over the past week, the anarchist affiliation Antifa (“Anti-fascist”) has received widespread and favorable...
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Topic: Why is the mass media supporting Antifa (Read 1333 times)