This article is migrated and was originally written in March 2021

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, many traditional methods of organising within radical politics have struggled, with a lot of groups re-evaluating their tactics, changing direction or even just dissolving under the pressure the pandemic has placed on them.

I’ve been a part of an Antifascist group that has primarily organised around calling street demonstrations and has often failed to reach outside the “activist sphere”, with a lot of time spent on unproductive work within the left instead of reaching outside of it.

I want to lay out an idea of how Antifascists can learn from the Latin American anarchist tradition of Especifismo and apply it within Antifascist organising.

What is Especifismo?

While I am focusing on Antifascism, Especifismo is an anarchist organising theory so first I’ll lay out the basics before discussing how it applies to Antifascism. The Black Rose Federation’s intro to Especifismo breaks it down into 3 key elements as shown below:

The need for specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis.

The use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political and organizing work.

Active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of “social insertion.”

A further expansion on Social Insertion reads:

Social insertion means anarchist involvement in the daily fights of the oppressed and working classes. It does not mean acting within single-issue advocacy campaigns based around the involvement of expected traditional political activists, but rather within movements of people struggling to better their own condition, which come together not always out of exclusively materially-based needs, but also socially and historically rooted needs of resisting the attacks of the state and capitalism. These would include rank-and-file-led workers’ movements, immigrant communities’ movements to demand legalized status, neighbourhood organizations’ resistance to the brutality and killings by police, working class students’ fights against budget cuts, and poor and unemployed people’s opposition to evictions and service cuts.

As described, Especifismo forces organisers to organise and get involved with people and groups outside of their comfy activist circles and aims to organise among the people hardest hit by the system organisers fight against.

It is important here to quickly make it clear that social insertion does not mean organisers forcing themselves into areas where they don’t belong; an organiser should involve themselves with a struggle that they share and not wade in with little understanding of the struggle expecting to lead, it is about becoming a part of the struggle not about attempting to lead it.

How this applies to Antifascism

It is important to make the distinction that the struggle against fascism, although deeply linked, is not the same as the struggle against capitalism and the state. These struggles are intertwined and should support one another, but deal with different elements of the violent mechanisms at work in the present system and shouldn’t be mixed up. Taking on Neo-Nazi skinheads is an extremely different struggle to taking on the government.

Antifascists have often struggled with what they’re meant to be doing and on many occasions have been (correctly) accused of parachuting in to hold demonstrations for the photos and post action write ups without actually putting the hard work in within communities to fight fascism at its roots.

A Campaign Against Racism and Fascism edition from 1992 quotes a member of the Bengali Youth Association member as saying: “yet another left-wing rally to remove the NF paper-sellers from Brick Lane’s Sunday market”, Before the organisers of the rally then “left home for the night”, he told them “Now you’ve had your curries and cleared your consciences, f**k off back to where you came from.”

CARF goes on to write: “We should destroy fascism at its racist roots and not merely react to it… Unless antifascist mobilisations have the backing of community organisations and are followed by the setting up of local committees run by local people, such marches can amount to little more than the macho flexing of left muscle.”

Strongly recommend reading the whole issue from CARF here

This lesson wasn’t learnt by Antifascists in the 90s and it hasn’t yet been learnt by Antifascists now; the primary work that we should be doing isn’t in black bloc demonstrations or large scale marches (although these still have to be done) but should instead be focused on organising not on the streets where it is easy to fight fascism, but where fascism grows and spreads with little resistance – whether that’s on football stands, musical gigs or online communities or in pre-existing community groups and local campaigns.

Specifically with the fact that Antifascist movements are often very white, coming out of the also very white “established left”, there is a level of access to white communities where racism and fascism will grow and thrive that should be utilised. Black Anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin writes in ‘The Progressive Plantation’:

“We must challenge and educate against racism and undermine fascist ideology in white communities… this type of hard, “dirty” work has to be done, no matter how unpopular or dangerous, if we are to deal with the effects of racism and fascist indoctrination in white communities. Thus, we have to be part of the people. We must understand no revolutionary force will arise from the white working population if they are not empowered and re-educated. They must not only be challenged on their racism, but raised up as a political force to fight, then educated to stand with Black, Brown and other non-white peoples to overthrow the system of oppression.”

With this in mind it is important that Antifascists, while militantly fighting fascists using some of the traditionally used tactics of Antifascism, go into communities and subcultures that can act as hotbeds of fascist recruitment and socially insert themselves into the struggle against fascism or, lacking any current struggle against fascism, set up groups to fight racism and fascism. This work can’t be done by large groups but must be taken on by individuals or small affinity groups that are already a part of or are adjacent to the communities or subcultures that will be targeted.

The role of the broader Antifascist group/network here is:

Support these individuals or affinity groups in their attempts to fight fascism within communities and subcultures which can include providing collectivised material aid as well as physical and strategic support where necessary Provide a structure for these small groups to come together when necessary, for example when a very large threat is posed to Antifascists and marginalised communities Utilise their large network and ability to mobilise great numbers to create a powerful force against fascist mobilisations This isn’t to say then that, like anti-organisationalist Anarchists I support only a network of affinity groups, but instead that affinity group and individualised organising can reach areas that a larger group cannot and this should be the focus of Antifascists’ efforts, the larger group then should be seen as serving two functions: a network of organisers involved in community or subculture Antifascist organising and a vehicle to mobilise people, collectivise resources and organise large scale campaigns.

Antifascists need to realise that being a broad Antifa group with only the vague goal of “fighting fascism” that doesn’t proactively build and spread Antifascist ideas within non-politicised or fascist-adjacent subcultures is doomed to remain a group of leftists recruiting out of the left until eventually the last organiser burns out.

People need to be learning from groups like Clapton CFC and the fans of it that are building an actively Antifascist presence within the non-league football subculture. Clapton’s impacts will be felt for decades because it has built Antifascism into something real instead of attempting to build an Antifascist movement out of thin air through black blocs and vague objectives.

An area where this has worked to an extent has been through Punk subculture where people created Antifascist fanzines, music and bands that became self-sustaining and have gone on to have a lasting impact in spreading Antifascism beyond the left and have successfully pushed many people into radical politics*. Antifascists should go into more subcultures like this to build a presence and force people to make a political decision on Antifascists’ terms.

(This being said, I feel it’s important to note that certain subcultures, like punk, get focussed on way too much by Antifascists today and people should aim to organise in subcultures that: aren’t comfortable and/or are hostile to Antifascists and ideally aren’t as white as many subcultures chosen by Antifascists in the past)

Antifascism will remain a niche group of individuals endlessly reacting to the same fascist threat unless existing Antifascists put the hard work in within the communities that act as either the front line against or the breeding ground for fascism and fight fascists there before they have to fight them in the streets.

This proposal of an Especifismo-style approach to Antifascism is one which I believe could be more effective than the traditional style of organising which in recent history has failed to build the movements we need to combat fascism effectively. In the UK we are facing the very real threat of a rapidly growing neo-nazi movement that is coupled with the most right wing and authoritarian government since Thatcher, Antifascism must be taken more seriously by all those opposed to the far right, but also we need to rethink how we organise and not repeat the same mistakes Antifascists have been making for decades.