yall kno antifa got beat by nazis in berkeley last night right?
if you didn’t, take a moment to soak that in and its implications for all of our future welfare, then get back to your pushups.
The Nazis bussed in from Montana to specifically attack Black Bloc and antifas. The Nazis WANTED a fight and came armed for it.
Time to organize up harder… also… get back to your pushups and cardio. We’ll need them.
Also remember, the police are on the side of the Nazis…
it is also important to recognize this as being fascist media spectacle: apparently the two sides held off each other for hours, the trump supporters waited for strength to wane, a lot of people left antifa, then the trump supporters armed themselves, armored up, and attacked people from behind. only the footage from this final attack was used in mainstream media; conservatives had this narrative packaged and published within minutes on the altright internet. this is the creation of a spectacle, a fascist control of the image, and it also should be regarded in terms of that.
not to mention the nanny state ready to defend their fascist children with the pigs. this was an intentional ideological morale boost for the right, bloggers were there to produce images and narratives for their online community. the left still doesn’t kno how to engage with ideological and information warfare like this.
part of the problem being a problem of communication, but a huge part of the issue is hyperreality. the enemy has a baudrillardian analysis of hyperreality and is using this to intentionally rewrite what is happening in ways that have widespread social effects; we are still struggling to prove “identity politics” to each other. we are failing to engage on the terms of 2017; we are failing to engage materially and tactically. we need to adjust.
anyway everything that is most important abt this topic is stuff that can’t be said in this venue.
dunno…personally I really hope that the message people take from this isn’t ‘we need to be better at making and spinning a media spectacle’ – clearly I’m not even in the same country or anything but I’d say that antifascism everywhere could do with a lot less spectacle and spin, less publicity in general. It would be much better if the physical confrontation could take place out of the spotlight, not at a predetermined time and place that’s been hyped up for weeks. The idea of a pitched battle really appeals to their fevered imaginations – best to make it as unexpected and unglamorous as possible, forget the costumes and the ritualised spectacular confrontations being recorded by fifteen people at the same time and live tweeted etc. Most of the time the ‘wins’ in this case are just them being shepherded away by the police anyway. If the focus was on good information about how they’re travelling, where they’re staying, drinking etc, and a few surprise visits that no one knows about until they’ve happened, I reckon their “baudrillardian analysis of hyperreality” would be a lot less important in the grand scheme of things.
Absolutely. I don’t underestimate the important of occasional public spectacle. The punching of Richard Spencer produced not just a morale boost but an increase in interest in nazi punching and militant anti-fascism on a world wide scale. There is value in very public wins like that but they should not be the whole of the struggle. Most of the struggle is the long fight of keeping nazis off the street again and again, day after day.
The shutting down of Milo Yiannopoulos’ talk in Berkeley did a lot for the antifa, but it wasn’t just because of the spectacle, it was because of the actual practical result it achieved and the weeks of working with the campus that preceded and followed it. Weeks during which students learned who was making their campus a better and safer place and who was not.
This one night, the nazis invested a lot of time, energy and financial resources to travel to one place and create a public spectacle in Berkeley. Tomorrow, Berkeley’s streets will belong to the antifa again. And the night after that. And the night after that. Because the nazis can not create that public spectacle over and over but the antifa, acting locally and with the support of the community, can hold their ground again and again. The nazis are using a one night spectacle because that’s all they can achieve. I take that as a sign of how weak they are in Berkeley.
So yeah, use spectacle, use cameras, use media warfare, but don’t let it become the struggle and certainly do not mistake spectacle for strength.
QueerAnarchism 