‘Let's Get Physical’: The Origins and Development of Anti-Fascist Action

Anti-Fascist Action was originally launched in London in 1985 as a non-sectarian successor to the Anti-Nazi League (ANL).Footnote ⁹ The ANL, originally established in 1977, had grown into Britain's pre-eminent anti-fascist movement, widely credited for inflicting major blows on the electoral aspirations of the neo-fascist National Front (NF) in the late 1970s. But by the early 1980s, with Britain's electoral far right in disarray, the ANL had fallen into abeyance.Footnote ¹⁰ Formed from various anti-racist and anti-fascist groups, AFA's founding statement from 1985 acknowledged the need to ‘oppose racism, and fascism, physically on the streets, and ideologically’. It also declared itself non-sectarian, organised on ‘democratic lines, with equal representation for all groups involved’.Footnote ¹¹ Led by a secretariat – the national secretary was anti-racist campaigner and future Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn – AFA counted 4,000 supporters at its launch.Footnote ¹² However, this original AFA unravelled due to internal tensions between militant anti-fascists and more moderate anti-racists. ‘The basic contradiction, from which everything else flowed’, we have been told by an anonymous author, ‘was between the opposing concepts of AFA as a militant action group and AFA as just another law abiding anti-racist protest group independent from political affiliations’.Footnote ¹³ By 1988, fractured by in-house sectarianism, AFA had all but collapsed.

The following year, however, AFA was resurrected as a militant, physical force anti-fascist group. At its peak during the mid-1990s, this re-launched AFA comprised some thirty-five to forty branches across Britain with notable activist strongholds in London, Manchester, the Midlands, Glasgow and Edinburgh. It published its own magazine called Fighting Talk – the hard-hitting title of a controversial slot given to the group on BBC2’s Open Space programme in May 1992.Footnote ¹⁴ The group's trademark was regular low-level street confrontations with the far right, principally the British National Party (BNP), which had by the early 1990s eclipsed the NF as Britain's premier extreme-right party.Footnote ¹⁵ The BNP numbered in the region of 3–4,000 members (compared to the NF's few hundred) and had become particularly active in south and east London, parts of the east Midlands and in the north. In what Mark Hayes aptly described a ‘clandestine turf-war’,Footnote ¹⁶ street clashes with the far right were directed by AFA's ‘fighting stewards’, controlling ‘anything from 20 to 150 people in street confrontations’.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet once the BNP withdrew from the streets in 1994, opting instead for more conventional electoral activity, AFA's militant anti-fascism became redundant. With AFA having seemingly served its purpose – it was the BNP which threw in the towel – some (though not all) anti-fascist militants shifted their priorities toward electoral involvement in a community-based working-class initiative known as the Independent Working-Class Association.Footnote ¹⁸ Struggling for an identity, AFA disbanded altogether in 2001.Footnote ¹⁹

When Anti-Fascist Action was relaunched in 1989, it had been the work (primarily) of Red Action (RA), a hard-line, semi-paramilitary Marxist group. Now defunct, RA had been formed in 1982 by militant anti-fascists who had been expelled from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) for partaking in physical force, anti-fascist ‘fighting groups’ (or ‘squads’).Footnote ²⁰ The SWP, the mainstay of the 1970s ANL, drove out the ‘squadists’ for replacing mass political action with ‘terrorism’. ‘We should never have survived’, declared one RA activist. ‘We didn't have the brains or the organisational abilities. We just wanted to meet the fascists head on. We're the abortion that lived’.Footnote ²¹ Whilst Red Action had been part of the original AFA (indeed, it had made the initial running in establishing AFA in 1985), it had little time for the moderate, ‘bureaucratic’ anti-racists who fronted AFA and spent the next three years ‘fighting a constant rearguard battle to keep AFA true to its founding statement of confronting fascists physically and ideologically’.Footnote ²² Modest in number, almost certainly no more than a few hundred, the RA membership was predominantly white, male and drawn from the manual working class. Two issues were identified with RA in particular. The first was militant, physical force anti-fascism; the second was support for the Irish republican cause, including backing both the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).Footnote ²³

In relaunching AFA, RA's principal objective had been to form a militant ‘united front’ of anti-fascists prepared to counter fascism not only physically on the streets but also ideologically – winning the hearts and minds of the white working class. Simply put, AFA saw fascism as reactionary, ultra-conservative and anti-working-class. It applied a ‘twin-track’ strategy: physical confrontation combined with ideological struggle. AFA not only wanted to restrict, contain and ultimately eradicate fascist activity through a physical war of attrition with fascists on the streets, it also counteracted fascist propaganda, typically through public speaking, organising concerts and other events and leafleting working-class housing estates. Following its 1989 relaunch, AFA encompassed a wider range of activists than Red Action alone, consisting of an alliance of various hard-left Marxist and anarchist groups, as well as many non-aligned, ‘single-issue’ anti-fascists. Organisationally, AFA was a decentralised federation, with groups stretching from Scotland to the English south coast. AFA in the north of Britain came together as a ‘Northern Network’ but London AFA, dominated by Red Action, produced AFA's magazine Fighting Talk, and it remained the driving force behind AFA at national level.Footnote ²⁴ This dominance (RA provided the backbone of AFA's ‘fighting stewards’) did generate tensions within the organisation, however. In 1994 for example, Birmingham AFA asserted its independence, changing its name to Birmingham Anti-Fascist Alliance.Footnote ²⁵ Nonetheless, AFA remained the foremost organisation on the militant wing of Britain's anti-fascist movement.

‘For the Anti-Fascist Resistance’: The Origins and Development of the Autonome Antifa (M)

Responding to the electoral breakthrough of the radical-right Republikaner in 1989, German reunification and a dramatic escalation in racist violence (epitomised by far-right attacks on refugees in Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Mölln and Solingen), militant anti-fascist (or ‘antifa’) groups sprung up across Germany.Footnote ²⁶ One such group was Göttingen's Autonome Antifa (M). Formed in early 1990 (the designation ‘M’ apparently referring to the day, Mittwoch (Wednesday), on which the anti-fascists met in Göttingen's JuZI youth centre), this militant anti-fascist group had its origins in the city's autonome (autonomous) scene. The ‘autonomists’ wanted to liberate themselves from capitalism through direct forms of immediate emancipatory action, achieving self-liberation in ‘domination-free’ spaces.Footnote ²⁷ They eschewed hierarchical organisation, were anti-patriarchal, anti-imperialist, did not adhere to a single ideology and rejected traditional forms of workers’ struggle, that is to say, they abstained from factory-based agitation. Looking neither to Moscow nor Beijing, subscribing to a ‘vague anarchism’, the autonomous movement ditched the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. Rather than adhere to the discipline of the vertical party model, autonomists favoured horizontal relationships. Their belief was that if one local group acted spontaneously then others would be inspired to follow. The expectation was that this ‘event-driven’ chain would build ‘counter-power’ and bring about social revolution ‘from below’.Footnote ²⁸

Until the mid-1980s anti-fascism had been a secondary concern for West Germany's autonomous movement. As Ben Mercer has recently pointed out, if ‘anti-fascism’ had been regularly invoked by West German student protesters in the 1960s as a manifestation of their anti-authoritarianism, after 1968 its value would diminish:

Of greater significance in the 1980s were anti-nuclear campaigns, anti-militarism, squatters’ struggles and opposition to Startbahn-West (a western runway extension at Frankfurt airport). It is highly revealing that in the first comprehensive account of the West German autonomous movement, published in 1990, anti-fascism is conspicuously absent.Footnote ³⁰ This is not to say that during the 1980s autonomists refrained from anti-fascist activity. The death of thirty-six year-old anti-fascist activist Günter Sare at a demonstration against the extreme-right National Democratic Party (Nationaldemoktratische Partei Deutschlands; NPD) in Frankfurt in September 1985 occasioned riots across a number of West German cities. In April 1986 an ‘autonomous commando’ calling itself ‘Revolutionary Anti-Fascists – Fire and Flames’ firebombed a barn in Mainz-Gonsenheim near Frankfurt. Neo-Nazis had been using the barn as a site to celebrate the anniversary of Hitler's birthday. In June 1986 in Stuttgart autonomous anti-fascists successfully mobilised against the first ever national congress of the neo-Nazi Free German Workers’ Party (Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; FAP). Over the next year or two, a series of anti-fascist counter mobilisations followed. Nonetheless, autonomous anti-fascists soon found themselves isolated. Ignored by the mainstream left Social Democrats and the trade unions who favoured the ‘legal’ anti-fascism of the East German sponsored Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime/Federation of Antifascists (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten; VVN-BdA)Footnote ³¹ an increasing number of autonomists grew tired of ‘riding all over [West] Germany trying to break up Nazi meetings’.Footnote ³² With the militant anti-fascist movement on the wane at a federal level, in the city of Göttingen in Lower Saxony, autonomous anti-fascists looked to build a more lasting base structure, and

Anti-fascism is a reactive phenomenon and its various manifestations ebb and flow according to the nature of the observed stimulus (‘fascism’, however understood). The primary catalyst in the formation of the AA (M) was the tragic death of a young anti-fascist. On 17 November 1989 anti-fascist student, Cornelia (Conny) Wessmann, was tragically killed following a clash between anti-fascists and riot police in Göttingen. Wessmann was knocked down by a car as she fled from a riot police baton charge. For several days a vigil occupied the site where Wessmann died. Five days after riot police broke up this vigil on 20 November, 18–20,000 people marched through the city. As this mass protest dispersed, a neo-Nazi skinhead stabbed and seriously injured a young man near Göttingen's train station. The police refused to accept that the attack was politically motivated and the assailant was never arrested.Footnote ³⁴ Wider developments contributed too, not least German reunification. In 1990 Göttingen's autonomous anti-fascists set about agitating against reunification under the slogan ‘Germany Never Again!’ (Nie wieder Deutschland!).Footnote ³⁵ German reunification was read as imperialist ‘annexation’ – the precursor to a ‘Fourth Reich’. In March 1990 a pamphlet calling for a demonstration in Göttingen against the ‘annexation’ of the German Democratic Republic was signed by the ‘Autonome Antifa (M)’, the first time that the group's name had appeared in public.Footnote ³⁶

One of the characteristic features of the autonomists was their appearance as a ‘Black Block’ (Schwarzer Block) at the head of demonstrations. This was a block of activists menacingly dressed all in black, wearing balaclavas and motorcycle helmets. Activists would sometimes carry clubs. This (illegal) tactic supposedly served several functions. At the symbolic level its purpose was to show that autonomous anti-fascists did not recognise the state's monopoly on violence. On a practical level it offered protection against surveillance and police action, as well as offering an obvious safeguard against fascist attacks. It could, of course, be construed as representing something far more sinister and subversive. The fact that it gave anti-fascists the freedom to throw signal flares and firecrackers without being identified hardly dispelled this impression. Yet despite retaining this highly distinctive and controversial tactic, Göttingen's autonomist anti-fascists wanted to reach out to a wider coalition of more moderate leftist forces. Drawing lessons from its past isolation, from the very beginning the group engaged in local media campaigns, making itself available for interviews, allowing photographers and journalists to record its activities. The group also placed special emphasis on an agitprop cultural-political initiative known as ‘Art and Struggle’ (Kunst and Kampf) – visual-artistic representations of anti-fascism in the form of posters, brochures, theatrical events and exhibitions.Footnote ³⁷

Arising from growing recognition that anti-fascists needed to counter neo-Nazi activity more effectively on a national level, in 1992, the peak year of racial violence in the newly reunified Germany,Footnote ³⁸ AA (M) led the way in the creation of the Anti-Fascist Action/Nationwide Organisation (Antifaschistische Aktion/Bundesweite Organisation; AA/BO). This was an umbrella organisation, founded in Wuppertal, of around a dozen regional ‘antifa’ groups (rising to seventeen by the end of 1995). To prevent hierarchies from being established, the organisation was based on the principle that each constituent group would send delegates to a nationwide meeting. As many women as men should attend and delegates should rotate.Footnote ³⁹ Building upon the idea of opening up to the outside – outlined by the AA (M) in an important 1991 discussion paper – the goal was to use militant anti-fascism as the vehicle for a broader based revolutionary counterculture.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet no binding definition of what was meant by anti-fascism was forthcoming and differences soon emerged over the organisation's short-, medium- and longer-term goals.Footnote ⁴¹ Nonetheless, over the course of 1993–94 the AA/BO co-operated on a series of successful inter-regional demonstrations, including one in Adelebsen near Göttingen in 1993 and another in Northeim, to the north of Göttingen, in 1994. These mobilisations (under the motto ‘Against the Fascist Centres!’) would typically attract around 2,000 participants.

It is never easy to be precise about the scale of militant anti-fascist activity, or the numbers of people involved. However, one anti-fascist activist has referred to an ‘official figure’ of 398 ‘militant actions against fascists’ in the Federal Republic in the peak year of 1992 (when a well-known far-right extremist was killed by anti-fascists in Berlin).Footnote ⁴² That year the numerical strength of autonomists was put at 5,000.Footnote ⁴³ The figures for two years later, provided by Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), estimated the size of the violent/militant extreme left at 6,700Footnote ⁴⁴ (by way of comparison, the German authorities estimated that the number of right-wing extremists in 1994 was 41,500, with 5,600 classified as ‘militant skinhead’).Footnote ⁴⁵ As for the AA (M) itself, about forty activists belonged to the group in 1994, almost all middle-class students.Footnote ⁴⁶

The (Twisted) Road to Transnational Cooperation

In their understanding that fascism was not just a national or German problem but a systemic problem of global capitalism, Göttingen's autonomists were keen to foster international solidarity with militant anti-fascist groups outside the Federal Republic. It was to this end that the group dispatched a letter of invitation to Red Action in 1992:

A number of other international groups were also invited to join with the AA (M) in demonstrating in Göttingen on 2 October 1992 to protest against the day of German Reunification. The slogan of the demonstration was ‘Create Anti-Fascist Unity – The Future Belongs to Us!’ Delegations from Denmark, Italy and France took part whilst others sent comradely messages of support. For whatever reason, Red Action did not.

Yet this does not mean to say that AFA paid no attention whatsoever to transnational activity. For during 1992 AFA had been participating in an embryonic European militant anti-fascist network. In fact, links with the militant French anti-fascist group SCALP-Reflex (Section carrément anti-Le Pen) had already been established.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1989 French militants had written to RA proposing a gathering of radical anti-fascist groups.Footnote ⁴⁹ Copies of REFLEXes magazine were sent to AFA branches and copies of Fighting Talk were exchanged in return. An Anti-Fascist German Solidarity Fund was also set up by the Tyne and Wear Anti-Fascist AssociationFootnote ⁵⁰ (affiliated to AFA's Northern Network) in response to the upsurge in far-right activity after German reunification. But it was the visit to London of the leader of the French National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in December 1991 and the launch of a new rival campaign group, the Campaign Against Fascism in Europe (CAFE)Footnote ⁵¹ that prompted AFA to designate one of its activists as an international liaison officer.Footnote ⁵² AFA also had to face up to competition in this sphere from the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), relaunched by the SWP in 1992. An ANL contingent had attended a recent demonstration against the National Front in France and had distributed a leaflet in French entitled How to Stop Le Pen (Comment Arreter Le Pen. For AFA, this was a deliberate ploy by the ANL to take over Europe's anti-fascist movement.Footnote ⁵³ Elsewhere, a further rival transnational anti-fascist movement entered the arena in the form of the Militant Tendency's Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE).

Yet AFA saw itself as the pre-eminent anti-fascist group in Britain, and it wanted that to be recognised internationally (it felt in danger of being left behind by rival groups on the European stage).Footnote ⁵⁴ So in May 1992 AFA accepted an invitation to attend a European anti-fascist/anti-racist conference in Eindhoven, which had been called to form a European anti-fascist movement on the basis of a manifesto drafted by the Anti-Fascist Front of Antwerp.Footnote ⁵⁵ But AFA had objected to the ‘series of liberal demands on the state to criminalise fascists and thus defeat them’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a result AFA, alongside other militant anti-fascist groups, broke away and held an impromptu alternative conference. This resulted in the launch of a new militant anti-fascist network, the European Anti-Fascist Infos Network. Significantly, the British contact for this network was not London AFA but AFA's branch in Leeds, northern England because a Leeds AFA organiser could speak French and had personal contacts with people at SCALP-Reflex.Footnote ⁵⁷

The objectives behind this embryonic transnational anti-fascist network had been to exchange information and ideas and, where possible, offer mutual solidarity and support. Each group in the network agreed to produce and circulate its own information bulletin. However, no international bulletins were ever compiled for AFA's magazine, Fighting Talk. Their absence was raised as a point of concern by Leeds AFA in June 1993 when it objected to Fighting Talk becoming nothing more than the mouthpiece of London AFA (that is to say, Red Action). To make matters worse Leeds AFA had paid for the latest issue of the magazine.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although an AFA delegation did attend the next network conference in Amsterdam in September 1993, AFA's engagement with this particular transnational network soon ended.

Given the internal criticism being voiced by Leeds AFA, London AFA was keen to assert itself as the organisation's ‘international contact’. So it was somewhat fortuitous that a member of the AA (M) sojourning in London in 1993 had made contact with London AFA. The result of this contact was that London AFA offered to host a representative of the AA (M) on a nationwide speaking tour in 1993. The co-founder of the AA (M), Bernd Langer, availed himself of the opportunity and spoke at AFA events in several cities including London, Liverpool, Manchester, York and Newcastle. An anonymous interview with Langer also appeared in Fighting Talk. This article was the first of a series of ‘Germany Calling’ magazine features penned by the Autonome Antifa. Translated from German into English by two militants from the United States who were in Göttingen at the time, the column ran from issue six in 1993 through to issue thirteen in 1996.Footnote ⁵⁹

In September 1993 the AA (M) invited an AFA delegation to participate in a protest demonstration on the eve of the third anniversary of German reunification. The invitation letter – ‘Greetings from Göttingen’ - was reproduced for inclusion in Fighting Talk.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two London AFA delegates attended (one male, one female). On their arrival in Germany, Bernd Langer recalls:

An obvious point that needs to be made here is that there was not a comparable autonomist movement in Britain. Within Britain's radical-left oppositional culture, although there was a strand of individual libertarianism evident in anarcho-punk, class politics remained central.Footnote ⁶² For a group like Red Action, any sustainable leftist group had to root itself in working-class communities. RA was disdainful of the alternative lifestyles of anarcho-punk and whilst willing to work operationally on the streets with anarchists (RA shared anarchism's decentralised anti-capitalism), it had little time for ‘identity’ politics around race, gender and sexuality. Given that RA had some issues with anarchists in Britain, it is unsurprising that they also had differences with the German autonomists, who shared some of the political, cultural and lifestyle characteristics of Britain's home-grown anarchists.Footnote ⁶³ ‘There's nothing wrong with being middle class, it's just there's something wrong if they can't attract working-class people’, one RA activist declared.Footnote ⁶⁴ But as Bernd Langer had already explained to readers of Fighting Talk, when it came to the autonomous movement in Germany, ‘most of the political activists have a middle class background, few workers are involved in the movement, they are rather the exception. The working class plays no part in the anti-fascist struggle’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Differences between the demonstration cultures of both groups were in evidence as well. This was reflected in the fact that the London AFA delegates, unlike the delegates from other countries, did not join the Schwarzer Block but instead joined demonstrators behind dressed in ‘normal’ clothing (some RA members favoured the ‘casuals’ look adopted by British football hooligans and by their opponents on the far right, such as Combat 18). Nonetheless, one AFA delegate did speak at the end of the demonstration. Welcoming the formation of the German Anti-Fascist Action/Nationwide Organisation, the AFA delegate called on militant anti-fascists to end their isolation by working not only within national borders but also across national borders. ‘This is why we are here today. It is only a small step, but it is a small step in the right direction.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Notwithstanding obvious cultural differences between their respective milieus, they both shared the same arena of struggle and contact between the two groups continued. In July 1994 a new development threw their common interest back into sharp relief when the homes of seventeen people (including Bernd Langer) suspected of being members of the Autonome Antifa were raided by police. The AA (M) had come under investigation according to paragraph 129a of the German criminal code (that is to say, in relation to propaganda for, support of, or membership of a terrorist organisation). The raids stemmed from a public discussion that the group had organised with two former Red Army Faction prisoners and the editor of the magazine Clockwork 129a in May 1993. Prosecutors claimed that the group's poster advertising the event gave support for terrorism. In June 1995, however, the charges relating to article 129a were thrown out by the State Supreme Court in Celle in Lower Saxony. An appeal was lodged by prosecutors and the federal court ruled that a trial should still proceed against the defendants on charges of forming a criminal organisation. For it to be defined as a ‘criminal organisation’, the AA (M) had been charged with violation of public assembly laws, specifically in reference to the Schwarzer Block. This, the authorities claimed, gave the impression of building a private army and violated the ban on uniforms. The state's objective, according to the Autonome Antifa, was the criminalisation of both the organisation and its politics.

For AFA events in Göttingen hit home. London AFA immediately drew parallels with its own experience of ‘state repression’. In 1992 a leading member of AFA, Gary O'Shea, had been subject to a charge of conspiracy to cause violent disorder. The charges had resulted from disturbances at a fascist meeting at London's Kensington Town Hall in late 1991. The prosecution case collapsed but throughout the trial the Detective Chief Inspector had apparently browsed through a file marked ‘Operation Blackshirt’.Footnote ⁶⁷ AFA believed that this file represented an on-going attempt by the British state to isolate and criminalise AFA through the use of selective arrests. AFA would also suspect that the security services had attempted to entrap anti-fascist militants during a 60,000-strong anti-fascist demonstration against the BNP's bookshop/HQ in Welling in south east London in October 1993. Selective arrests, AFA believed, were intended to blunt its ‘cutting edge’, ‘intimidate the periphery’ and thereby ‘bolster the reputation of a more moderate or bogus’ rival organisations, such as the recently relaunched (and more moderate) Anti-Nazi League.Footnote ⁶⁸ London AFA's statement of support to their German comrades read,

The message ended with the prediction that ‘your reality today is ours tomorrow’.Footnote ⁶⁹ For AFA events in Lower Saxony represented a serious threat to militant anti-fascists not just in Germany but everywhere.

In the wake of the July 1994 raids AFA asked Langer and another AA (M) representative to return to London and organised a public meeting in the capital to publicise the cause of their German comrades. Significantly, discussions had taken place regarding the possibility of co-hosting an international conference in order to set up a new international militant anti-fascist network. For AFA a central aim of this broader transnational cooperation was to overcome the ‘isolation, oppression and even criminalisation’ faced by militant anti-fascists.Footnote ⁷⁰ It was agreed that a conference manifesto would be drafted, and Göttingen was identified as the most suitable venue for the conference, provisionally scheduled for spring 1995.Footnote ⁷¹ As it turned out, however, the AA (M) took exception to the manifesto draft. For AFA, the issue that united militant anti-fascists was their working-class orientation: ‘the middle-class Left do not want to fight. They lost the habit of fighting years ago. The struggle frightens them. So they invent excuses.’Footnote ⁷² For the AA (M), which apparently did not respond to the draft proposal until November 1995, any international network had to be rooted in a common anti-imperialism. Another point of divergence related to the struggle against patriarchy which the AA (M) viewed as integral to its politics. Relations between the two groups further soured in 1996 when the AA (M) reached a conclusion to their trial proceedings. The charges against AA (M) were finally dropped in 1996 after the defendants promised to respect the rights of assembly in the future and to donate over 50,000 Deutsche Mark to the Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp Memorial near Nordhausen.Footnote ⁷³ RA/London AFA interpreted their action, which brought an end to demonstrations utilising the Schwarzer Block in Lower Saxony, as surrendering meekly to the apparatus of the state.Footnote ⁷⁴

‘The First International’

In October 1996, acting unilaterally, AFA distributed a letter proposing an international conference of militant anti-fascists in Britain over one weekend in the summer/autumn of 1997. It believed that such a conference had become essential for a number of reasons: first, to empower militant anti-fascists at the international level; second, to counteract the international networks of fascists, the state and the ‘conservative’ left; third, to discuss and exchange tactics, mutual support and propaganda; fourth, to build networks around football, prisoner welfare and music; fifth, to develop communication, particularly in exploiting the new possibilities offered by the internet and, finally, to make sure that the ideas and experiences of militant anti-fascists were promoted internationally.Footnote ⁷⁵ In light of positive responses from thirty-six different organisations, the first ever international conference of militant anti-fascists to be held in Britain was finally scheduled to take place in London during the first weekend in October 1997. Notwithstanding their differences, Bernd Langer once again returned to London and achieved some reconciliation after meeting with two AFA members prior to the conference. But the conference itself was not co-hosted, it was AFA's solo project.Footnote ⁷⁶

AFA had booked the conference venue – the London Irish Centre in Camden, north London – in April 1997. However, the Centre cancelled the booking just days before the event. The Centre's management insisted that the Centre would lose its charitable status if it were seen to support an organisation with a history of physical confrontation against fascists. The problem was that AFA had ill-advisedly issued a press release on 18 September 1997 entitled ‘Militant Anti-Fascist Call to Arms’. The press release stated that the anti-fascist conference would ‘discuss effective tactics, including direct action, against the far right’. It also revealed that representatives from the AA (M), which had recently ‘faced charges of raising a private army’ and ‘being a front for the Red Army Faction’, would be addressing the conference.Footnote ⁷⁷

Fortuitously, AFA secured an alternative venue in London at the eleventh hour. The conference drew delegates from no fewer than twenty-two organisations, including groups from Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Spain and even the United States and Canada. The main conference session was given over to discussing the draft manifesto document proposed by AFA. The opening lines of draft document had warned that,

But whilst a minority of the large German representation was said to have ‘strongly identified with the central tenets of this document’, namely the call to destroy fascist influence in working-class areas, significantly, the majority (of German/Scandinavian opinion) maintained that politically, the working class no longer existed.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Langer, the spokesperson for the group that criticised AFA's insistence on a working-class orientation, ‘building up a cult about and around the working class or labour movement’ seemed ‘at least in Germany, absurd. . . . A working class in a historical sense does not exist anymore’ for working-class identity had been destroyed by Nazism and post-war prosperity.Footnote ⁸⁰ Others berated AFA for failing to accept that a successful anti-fascist movement depended on recruiting support from all those who were direct targets of fascism, that is to say, immigrants, Jews, homosexuals and women. But RA/AFA's line was that anti-fascism should not be targeted at the victims of fascism but at fascism's potential, white working-class recruits. That AFA, as the convening group, was almost entirely male in composition did not sit well with feminist conference-goers. The registration form for the conference was even construed by some as ‘sexist’ – it had asked participants if they wanted to play football.Footnote ⁸¹ (London AFA did have something of a macho football culture, with many supporting Manchester United Football Club – ‘cockney reds’).Footnote ⁸² For AFA's Red Action contingent, these criticisms epitomised all that was wrong with contemporary anti-fascism and the wider ‘progressive’ left: a multi-cultural, middle-class mind-set in which the deification of difference (race, gender and sexual preference) had replaced class equality:

In the end, with such disagreements over the relationship between class politics and anti-fascism proving so fractious, even though an impressive twenty-two groups attended, far fewer groups – nine – signed up to the international network when it was officially launched in April 1998. Key signatory groups were AFA Hannover,Footnote ⁸⁴ R.O.T.K.A.P.C.H.E.N.,Footnote ⁸⁵ Anti-Fascist Platform Zaragoza,Footnote ⁸⁶ Toronto's Anti-Fascist ForumFootnote ⁸⁷ and Anti-Racist Action from Minneapolis.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, the AA (M) did not join the network, and nor did AFA Scandinavia.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Autonome Antifa published a damning report of the conference in its newspaper, Einsatz, which critiqued AFA for trying to impose a general, common anti-fascist movement, and for concentrating exclusively on the physical confrontation of fascists on the streets.Footnote ⁹⁰ For sure, AFA's recourse to physical force was undoubtedly key to its self-identity: it had made much of a major confrontation with fascists at London's Waterloo train station in 1992. One AFA spokesperson had remarked that, ‘if the anti-fascist movement in Europe had implemented a policy of No Platform for fascists with the same commitment that we showed at Waterloo, then Rostock would still be just a small town in Germany’.Footnote ⁹¹

In line with its credo that anti-fascism would only succeed if it won the battle for working-class hearts and minds, AFA continued to prescribe that a working-class orientation occupy centre-stage. This was the central message that two AFA representatives further conveyed to German anti-fascists at several meetings in Germany during July 1998. The purpose of these meetings in Hamburg, Hannover, Buchenwald and Berlin was to engage a wider spectrum of the German anti-fascist movement and to discuss with them the current situation in Germany from the perspective of AFA's newly-formed International Militant Anti-Fascist Network. But AFA's representatives were once more confronted by the ‘mysterious disappearance of the German working class’. The belief that the German working class had been eradicated by post-war prosperity was, unbelievably, according to AFA, a ‘simple statement of fact’ when it came to the German anti-fascist movement. For AFA identification of the working class was really quite easy: for the purposes of anti-fascism it meant the bottom 30–40 per cent of society. To remove class from anti-fascism, AFA thought, was to deny the working class any revolutionary agency and in so doing prepared ground for the far right.Footnote ⁹² ‘For those leading German anti-fascism’, AFA explained, ‘it is easier to deny the existence of the working class than it is to address the problems and needs of the working class. Therefore, whole working class communities are abandoned by the Left and become the uncontested strongholds of fascism’.Footnote ⁹³ Speaking with anti-fascist football fans in Hamburg – Glasgow AFA had established links with German anti-fascists at F.C. St Pauli during 1991Footnote ⁹⁴ – one fan commented to AFA that the problem was that the middle-class left in Germany could no longer relate to working-class people because so few of them came from the working class themselves.Footnote ⁹⁵

What relations with German autonomists so clearly highlighted was RA/AFA's preoccupation with the working class. RA apologists have argued that it was never the intention ‘to make a fetish of the working class’ and there was recognition that workers ‘were no more intelligent, courageous or humanitarian than any other people’. The key point for RA/AFA was that the working class had to be the ‘critical dynamic driving progressive social change’.Footnote ⁹⁶ But for AA (M) this position did not speak to the material realities of an affluent German society. So would any German anti-fascist group adopt and implement an AFA-style, pro-working class strategy? Perhaps unsurprisingly, only groups from more deprived areas of Germany, from Dresden and Cottbus, were receptive to AFA's message agreeing to form an ad-hoc committee and organise a national conference in 1999.

Even so, it was more talk than action. A solitary example of where this strategy was put into effect in Germany involved Red Antifa (Rote Antifa) in Berlin. This group, which become part of AFA's international militant anti-fascist network in 1998, had held formal discussions with AFA in London during AFA's third annual Cable Street commemoration in October 1998.Footnote ⁹⁷ In what was described as a ‘ground-breaking’ move, Rote Antifa adopted an AFA-style strategy in the deindustrialising Treptow district of East Berlin during 1999. The group felt that former East Germans were losing their ‘new-found loyalty to the middle class system that gave them their “freedom”, and there is a general feeling of indifferent, unchannelled anti-capitalism in the air’.Footnote ⁹⁸ ‘The basic co-ordinates of our campaign are clear’, it explained, ‘no cooperation with discredited middle class organisations, a radical, working class community orientation, whilst making it clear that there is no way out of the capitalist system but revolution’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rote Antifa’s campaign involved posters, distributing a newspaper highlighting local problems and staging an anti-fascist concert in Treptow. Whilst the group believed that it had made a promising start no further reports from this group were published in Fighting Talk. Regrettably the trail then runs cold. Besides which, before long AFA had collapsed as a national organisation – the number of AFA branches fell from over twenty-five in 1999 to under five within a year – and Fighting Talk ceased publication altogether with issue twenty-five in May 2001.

Without AFA to sustain it, the ‘First International’ simply dissolved, although even after its demise, AFA's example would serve to inspire the Swedish group Revolutionära Fronten formed in 2002.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The only visible remnant of the International Militant Anti-Fascist Network was its half-finished website.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Three years later the AA (M) followed AFA into the annals of militant anti-fascist history when, after fourteen years in existence, it finally folded in 2004. Like AFA, German anti-fascist militants had also experienced something an identity crisis when in 2000 Germany's Red-Green coalition government clamped down on the extreme right, suggesting that fascists were hardly ‘storm-troopers of the system’ and thereby undermining the credibility of a system-oppositional approach.

Transnational Anti-Fascism without Fascists? The (Curious) case of Anti-Fascist Action Ireland

One group that had also formed part of AFA's transnational network was the Dublin-based Anti-Fascist Action Ireland, first established in 1991. So what does the Irish case tell us that that German case does not? Significantly, in the Irish case, British–Irish transnational links were personal and were facilitated by Irish republican sympathies. British–German links were not, and what is more, as far as the ‘national question’ was concerned, German militant anti-fascists had categorically rejected re-unification.

The example of AFA Ireland clearly underscores the importance of personal trajectories in sustaining transnational circuits. AFA Ireland's founding members had moved to London in the late 1980s where they had become involved first with RA, and then London AFA. One their return to Dublin, a branch of Red Action was established in 1990. In February 1991 the visit of Jean-Marie Le Pen along with sixteen members of the European Parliament's ‘Technical Group of the European Right’ to Dublin Castle prompted the formation of AFA Ireland shortly afterwards. As one of the founders recalled, ‘when we came back from London, there was a conscious decision made to get more organised. Up till then, we were individual anti-fascists acting ad hoc.’Footnote ¹⁰²

As we have already observed, support for Irish Republicanism, alongside anti-fascism, dominated RA's politics. In fact, given the obvious links between Ulster Loyalism and the British far right, the causes of Irish Republicanism and militant anti-fascism were mutually reinforcing. RA would steward Republican events in Britain, such as Bloody Sunday and Troops Out marches, which would often attract the attentions of the far right and therein offer opportunities for physical confrontation. RA would also organise regular trips to Belfast. ‘Like anti-fascism’, Sean Birchall explains, ‘that the Irish struggle had long ceased to be fashionable among the liberal Left only added to its appeal’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Numerous RA members shared Irish descent; some RA members even graduated to Republican terrorism. In December 1993 Liam Heffernan, active in AFA's Northern Network at the time of his arrest,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ was sentenced to twenty-three years for conspiracy to steal explosives and to cause explosions in connection with the INLA; in May 1994 Patrick Hayes (an AFA chief steward in east London) and Jan Taylor were both sentenced to thirty years for their part in the IRA's Harrods and Ramsgate train bombings. Needless to say, establishing an AFA branch in Belfast would have been unwise for it may well have invited attention from Loyalist paramilitaries. Whilst AFA, as a ‘single-issue’ organisation, did not adopt an ‘official’ position on Ireland, it saw ‘Loyalism’ in Ulster (and in Scotland) as a ‘parochial form of fascism’ because it believed that it shared many of the same characteristics: patriotism, supremacism, discrimination, authoritarianism and anti-working class/anti-socialist practice.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Establishing a branch south of the border in Dublin was a different proposition altogether. Yet oddly there was no pressing need for a militant anti-fascist presence – proving something of the exception to the rule that anti-fascism requires a fascism to oppose. There was no organised far-right group in Ireland; no fascist group that had any real street presence, a point that was made, somewhat ironically by AFA Ireland in a letter to the Irish World newspaper in 1997.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, there had not been any significant fascist element on the streets of Dublin since the Architects of the Resurrection in the 1940s, a fascist-style party that had won several seats in local government elections in 1945.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ British fascist leader Oswald Mosley had moved to Ireland in the 1950s. In December 1953 his home in Co. Galway had burnt down – rumour has it by the IRA.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Far-right extremism struggled to resonate in Ireland simply because it had no political space, crowded out as it was by Sinn Féin, a non-mainstream, radical nationalist party. Not until the mid-1990s did large numbers of immigrants arrive in the Republic for the first time. Yet Irish nationalism does not sit well with anti-immigrant populism. With Irish nationalism so rooted in the struggle against ‘British colonialism’ and with Catholics portrayed as ‘victims’ of discrimination, engaging in anti-minority campaigning is at odds with Irish nationalist mythology.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Nonetheless, it is clear that the founders of AFA Ireland felt that there was still some residual fascist threat. From the very start they adopted the twin approach of physically and ideologically confronting fascism. Sporadic physical confrontations occurred around attempts by a group of ‘Blood & Honour’ skinheads to establish a presence amongst Dublin's punk scene; confrontations also occurred around attempts by a hooligan group to establish a far-right presence amongst supporters of Dublin's GAA Gaelic football team. Consistent with its parent organisation, AFA Ireland did see working-class areas as critical to its fight against the far right. In 2002 it distributed 20,000 leaflets in the working-class constituency of Dublin South Central where the eccentric female leader of the miniscule Immigration Control Platform (ICP) stood in the Irish general election. In the event Áine Ní Chonaill polled just 2.1 per cent of the vote. Yet notwithstanding its clear working-class orientation, AFA Ireland remained somewhat less sectarian than AFA in Britain. And, as one of its activists pointed out, this was an important factor in its relative longevity (it celebrated its twenty-first anniversary in 2012). So whilst AFA in Britain disintegrated as RA pushed for the adoption of electoral and local activism, AFA Ireland became a self-sustaining group, able to retain the core of people who had been involved with it from the very beginning whilst also drawing support from a variety of different Republican, anarchist and left-wing groups.Footnote ¹¹⁰