https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0187-2228
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Abstract
In the United States, the first presidential debate of 2020 featured a discussion about Antifa. While Biden argued that Antifa is “an idea, not an organization,” Trump portrayed it as a “dangerous, radical group.” The nature of Antifa sparks disagreements not only in politics but also in scholarly circles. Some view it as a loosely defined label for a fragmented collective. Others perceive it as a gang or a radical social movement. This article identifies four key factors that make it difficult to define Antifa: the anonymity of its members, the lack of identifiable representatives, the ambiguous affiliation boundaries, and the influence of external agents (including reporters, pundits, and detractors) shaping its identity. Faced with this challenge, I propose stepping back to reevaluate the underlying assumptions of the debate. I seek to complement current theories of social ontology and collective action by introducing an alternative approach centered around the concept of personification.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses gratitude to Luciano Venezia and Luis Rossi for their unwavering support and encouragement throughout the research process. Special thanks also go to Christine Chwaszcza, Joseph Lacey, Cristian Pérez Muñoz, Anne Schwenkenbecher, and Chiara Valsangiacomo for their helpful criticism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Gerhard Peters and John Woolley, “Donald J. Trump, Presidential Debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio Online,” The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/343824
2 Farah Stockman, “Who Were the Counterprotesters in Charlottesville?,” The New York Times August 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/who-were-the-counterprotesters-in-charlottesville.html
3 Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (New York, NY: Mellville House, 2017), xvi.
4 Bray, Antifa, xvii.
5 Nigel Copsey, “Militant Antifascism: An Alternative (Historical) Reading,” Society 55 (2018): 247.
6 BBC News, “Antifa: Trump says group will be designated terrorist organisation,” BBC, May 5, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52868295
7 Peters and Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/343824
8 Trump, Donald (@realDonaldTrump). 2020. Twitter, October 1, 4:31 a.m. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1311493853615071232
9 Gary LaFree, “Is Antifa a Terrorist Group?,” Society 55 (2018): 248–49.
10 The Global Terrorism Database criteria are available online https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/downloads/Codebook.pdf
11 David Pyrooz and James Densley, “On Public Protest, Violence, and Street Gangs,” Society 55 (2018): 231.
12 Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Anti-fascism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 11.
13 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 13.
14 Michael Kenney and Colin Clarke “What Antifa Is, What It Isn’t, And Why It Matters,” War on the Rocks, June 23, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/what-antifa-is-what-it-isnt-and-why-it-matters
15 Eric Tucker and Ben Fox, “FBI Director Says Antifa is an Ideology, not an Organization,” The Washington Post, September 17, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-director-says-antifa-is-an-ideology-not-an-organization/2020/09/17/6d333458-f915-11ea-85f7-5941188a98cd_story.html
16 Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Sandra Garcia, “What Is Antifa, the Movement Trump Wants to Declare a Terror Group?,” The New York Times, September 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-antifa-trump.html
17 Mark Hemingway, “Roots of Antifa: This ‘Idea’ Has Violent Consequences,” RealClearInvestigations, October 30, 2020, https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/10/30/roots_of_antifa_this_idea_has_violent_consequences_125818.html
18 James Short and Lori Hughes, “Antifa, Street Gangs, and the Importance of Group Processes,” Society 55 (2018): 255.
19 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 118.
20 Adam Klein, “From Twitter to Charlottesville: Analyzing the Fighting Words Between the Alt-Right and Antifa,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019): 315.
21 Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips, “The Masked Demos: Associational Anonymity and Democratic Practice,” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 4 (2020): 576.
22 Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Ramón Feenstra, eds. Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements: Protest in Turbulent Times (London, UK: Routledge, 2020), 9.
23 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 51.
24 Klein, “From Twitter to Charlottesville,” 299.
25 Ibid., 301.
26 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 171.
27 Ruth Reader, “White nationalists are Using Fake antifa Twitter Accounts to Disrupt Protests,” Fast Company, June 3, 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90512186/white-nationalists-are-using-fake-antifa-twitter-accounts-to-disrupt-protests?
29 See: Kenney and Clarke, “What Antifa is;” Tina Nguyen, “How ‘Antifa’ Became a Trump Catch-all,” Politico, June 2, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/02/how-antifa-became-a-trump-catch-all-297921; Aleszu Bajak and Javier Zarracina, “How the Antifa Conspiracy Theory Traveled from the Fringe to the Floor of Congress,” USA Today, January 13, 2021, https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/01/12/how-antifa-conspiracy-theory-traveled-fringe-floor-congress/6620908002/
30 Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (London, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 133.
31 Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements, 9.
32 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 249.
33 Castells, Networks of Outrage, 249–50.
34 Ibid., 277.
35 Ibid., 131-2.
36 Mónica Brito Vieira, “Founders and Re-founders: Struggles of Self-authorized Representation,” Constellations 22, no. 4 (2015): 504.
37 Paolo Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3.
38 In this respect, see David Graeber, The Democracy Project (New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2013) on “consensus,” and Castells, Networks of Outrage, 132.
39 See Vysotsky, American Antifa, 96. A similar phenomenon can be found in the 2018-2019 Yellow vests movement in France, which, according to Samuel Hayat, “Unrepresentative Claims: Speaking for Oneself in a Social Movement,” American Political Science Review 116, no. 3 (2022): 1045, operated through “unrepresentative claims,” that is, claims such as ‘I speak only for myself.’ By this means, prominent members avoided portraying themselves as leaders, thus respecting the horizontal setup of the movement, while at the same time they reinforced a specific identity promoted by the collective, namely, the identity embodied by them.
40 Colin Hay, “Political Ontology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 462.
41 Hay, “Political Ontology,” 464.
42 For a theory that conceives corporate agents as members of the “moral community,” see Peter French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984), 32. French’s paradigmatic account of group agency links corporate intentionality and moral agency to a “corporate internal decision structure” (Collective and Corporate Responsibility, 13).
43 This account of corporate agency is given by Kendy Hess, “The Peculiar Unity of Corporate Agents,” in Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, ed. Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski, and Tracy Isaacs (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 37.
44 Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How we Make the Social World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89.
45 Gilbert, Joint Commitment, 34.
46 On the notion of a group’s ethos, see Raimo Tuomela, Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14.
47 Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 69.
48 Christopher Kutz, Complicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90.
49 Kutz, Complicity, 94.
50 I borrow the term from Scott Shapiro, who notes that this conception requires “too great a commitment on behalf of the participants in a shared activity.” See Scott Shapiro, “Massively Shared Agency,” in Rational and social agency: The philosophy of Michael Bratman, ed. Manuel Vargas and Gideon Yaffe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 277.
51 Under this understanding militants would, as Olivier Roy and Anne Schwenkenbecher argue, “intend to contribute to a shared (or public) plan but otherwise know little or nothing about other participating agents’ intentions.” See Olivier Roy and Anne Schwenkenbecher, “Shared Intentions, Loose Groups, and Pooled Knowledge,” Synthese 198, no. 5 (2019): 4538.
52 Indeed, it could be conceptualized as a “nonmovement,” drawing on the insights of Asef Bayat, renowned for his incisive analysis of the Arab Spring phenomenon. Bayat describes nonmovements as “collective actions of noncollective actors” engaged in “fragmented but similar activities” aimed at challenging the status quo. See Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 15.
53 Pace Erskine’s criterion of self-assertion that “disqualify[ies] groups that do not see themselves as units,” Antifa might be a group that is mainly “externally defined.” See Toni Erskine, “Assigning Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents: the Case of States and Quasi-states,” Ethics & International Affairs 15, no. 2 (2001): 72.
54 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 244, my emphasis.
55 Ibid., 247.
56 Ibid., 246.
57 Philippe Urfalino, “La Réalité des Groupes Agents,” Raisons Politiques 66, no. 2 (2017): 89, points out that Hobbes remains in a “substitution model,” where the attitudes of the collective can be reduced to the attitudes of the representative.
58 For an account of this argument, see Quentin Skinner, “Classical Rhetoric and the Personation of the State,” in From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 12–44. Also, Mónica Brito Vieira, “Making up and making real,” Global Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (2020): 321, and Jerónimo Rilla, “Hobbes and prosopopoeia,” Intellectual History Review, 32, no. 2 (2022): 259-280. An alternative reading can be found in Johan Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.: Hobbes on the nature and person of the state,” History of European Ideas, 47, no. (2021): 17–32.
59 As Sean Fleming, Leviathan on a Leash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 108, claims, “the Hobbesian account of attribution… eliminates the need to posit corporate intentions.”
60 John Searle, Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13.
61 Searle, Making the Social World, 12.
62 Groups, Searle grants it in Making the Social World, 99–100, pose a “puzzling case” because “we need to specify not just that the function exists, but that there is an entity Y, the corporation, that has the function.” It is worth noting that Searle’s status function declaration puts the creation of “the United States Army” on a par with “the Mafia, Al Qaeda, and the Squaw Valley Ski Team” (Ibid, 100).
63 Ibid, 57–9.
64 Ibid, 57.
65 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 75.
66 Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171.
67 List and Pettit, Group Agency, 173.
68 Philip Pettit had already addressed this issue in Made with words: Hobbes on language, mind, and politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 55–69. See also Marko Simendic, “Thomas Hobbes’s person as persona and ‘intelligent substance’,” Intellectual History Review 22, no. 2 (2012), 147–62.
69 Andrew Rehfeld, “Towards a general theory of political representation,” The Journal of Politics 68, no. 1 (2006), 2.
70 Rehfeld, “Towards a general theory,” 8–9.
71 Ibid, 11.
72 Searle, Making the Social World, 10.
73 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. Harold Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), 391.
74 See James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39.
75 Andrew Escobedo, Volition’s Face (Notre Dame, IN: UNDP, 2017), 15, notes that personification connects “the order of being to the order of doing,” enabling “inanimate things, such as passions, abstract ideas, and rivers,” to “perform actions in the landscape of the narrative.”
76 As a caveat, I am not addressing personification in the context of spontaneous metaphors, for instance, “my car refused to start this morning.” Aletta Dorst, “Personification in Discourse: Linguistic Forms, Conceptual Structures and Communicative Functions,” Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (2011): 122, clarifies: “conventional personifications can occur on a purely linguistic level without the need for these words to be processed as personifications.”
77 See Paul Chilton and George Lakoff, “Foreign Policy by Metaphor,” in Language and Peace, ed. Christina Schaffner and Anita Wenden (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995), 39; and Alexander Wendt “The State as Person in International Theory,” Review of International Studies 30, no. 2 (2004), 289–316.
78 See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 26.
79 Mikey Biddleston, Aleksandra Cichocka, Iris Žeželj and Michal Bilewicz, “Conspiracy Theories and Intergroup Relations,” in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, eds. Michael Butter and Peter Knight (London, UK: Routledge, 2020), 221.
80 Purington et al., “‘Alexa is my new BFF’ Social Roles, User Satisfaction, and Personification of the Amazon Echo,” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017), 2858.
81 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Durham University Press, 2019), 107.
82 Sheryl Hamilton, Impersonations (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 8.
83 Hamilton, Impersonations, 12.
84 Ibid., 228.
85 This aligns with Paul De Man’s perspective on apostrophe, where prosopopoeia is seen as the fiction of addressing an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity. See The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), 75.
86 François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism. (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2010), 90.
87 Cooren, Action and Agency, 102.
88 Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 16, had already detected this difference germane to the concept of representation between owning or disowning what is being said or acted.
89 Cooren, Action and Agency, 102.
90 Ibid.
91 For an argument on this respect, see Matthew Hannah, “QAnon and the Information Dark Age,” First Monday 26, no. 2 (2021): 2.
92 I extract these characteristics from the work of Jana Egelhofer and Sophie Lecheler, “Fake News as a Two-Dimensional Phenomenon: A framework and research agenda,” Annals of the International Communication Association 43, no. 2 (2019): 99.
93 Ethan Zuckerman, “QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal,” Journal of Design and Science 6, no. 6 (2019): 5.
94 Zuckerman, “QAnon,” 7.
95 Ibid, 6.
96 Leonhard Dobusch and Dennis Schoenborn, “Fluidity, Identity, and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous,” Journal of Management Studies 52, no. 8 (2015): 1006.
97 Dobusch & Schoenborn, “Fluidity, identity, and organizationality,” 1010.
98 Luke O’Brien, “The Nazi-Puncher’s Dilemma,” HuffPost, December 10, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nazi-punch-antifa_n_59e13ae9e4b03a7be580ce6f
99 Nancy Pelosi, “Statement Condemning Antifa Violence in Berkeley,” Press Release, August 29, 2017, https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/82917
100 Logan Rimel, “My ‘Nonviolent’ Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men,” Radical Discipleship, August 23, 2017, https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/08/23/my-nonviolent-stance-was-met-with-heavily-armed-men.
101 David Brennan, “Most Republicans Still Believe Capitol Riot Antifa Conspiracies: Poll,” Newsweek (January 14, 2021), available online at: https://www.newsweek.com/most-republicans-still-believe-capitol-riot-antifa-conspiracies-poll-1561542
102 See, for instance, Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, “Antifa Rumors Spread on Local Social Media with no Evidence,” NBC News, June 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/antifa-rumors-spread-local-social-media-no-evidence-n1222486
103 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 95.
104 See Bray, Antifa, 169, on the “tendency to interpret anti-fascist violence as superficially as possible.”
105 Matthew Knouff, An Outsider’s Guide to Antifa, Vol. II (Layayette, IN: Conscious Cluckery, 2018), 92.
106 Vysotsky, American Antifa, 91.
107 This has been highlighted concerning corporate management. Ashman and Winstanley, “For or Against Corporate Identity? Personification and the Problem of Moral Agency,” Journal of Business Ethics 76, no. 1 (2007): 86, explored how personifications “intended to influence corporate clients” are also mobilized “to reach out other important stakeholders, most notably employees.”
108 William Gillis, “To Accuse Antifa of Opposing Free Speech is to Entirely Miss the Point,” in Antifa and the Radical Left, ed. Eamon Doyle (New York, NY: Greenhaven Publishing, 2019), 133.
109 Castells, Networks of Outrage, p. 132. In similar terms, art theorist Sven Lütticken, “Personafication,” New Left Review 96 (2015): 116, holds that these movements “exacerbate the fiction of the fictive person by opting for opacity. Here, a collective conceptual persona becomes an activist and aesthetic tool.”
110 Tuomela, Social Ontology, 169.
111 Kutz, Complicity, pp. 166-67. Elsewhere, Christopher Kutz, “The Difference Uniforms Make: Collective Violence in Criminal Law and War,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005): 171, addressed the issue of complicity in terrorist acts as “a distinctive form of moral and legal responsibility that links agents to outcomes by way of their participation in a collective effort, and largely independently of their individual causal contributions.”
112 Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley, “The Psychology of Lone-wolf Terrorism,” Counselling Psychology Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2011): 123.
113 According with Violetta Igneski, it can be envisaged that even “unstructured groups can have the mediated capacity to achieve a moral end and so can have collective duties and this gives individuals that are part of unstructured collectives obligations to do their part.” See Violetta Igneski, “Individual Duties in Unstructured Collective Contexts,” in Collectivity, ed. Kendy Hess et al., 138.
114 Nigel Copsey and Samuel Merrill, “Violence and Restraint within Antifa: A View from the United States,” Perspectives on Terrorism 14, no. 6 (2020): 129.